Latex Spelling and Grammar Check

This document contains information on how to conduct spell and grammar checking of Latex documents. It supposes you have a Latex file called check.tex.

Spell check using aspell

1. Close the editor for the file, otherwise the file cannot be updated.
2. Type aspell --mode=tex -c filename in the terminal — so in this example type aspell --mode=tex -c check.tex.
3. The programme will show the typos one by one. Suggestions for corrections are given as well.
4. At the end your original Latex file will be updated.

Grammar check (+ spell check)

The procedure described here involves converting your Latex document to HTML, importing this into MS Word, and finally using the grammar checker in Word.

1. Type latex2html -no_navigation -split 0 check.tex in the terminal. This directs the program to generate output that is (largely) confined to one HTML file, and without added navigation links.
2. A folder named check is created, which will contain various files; the most important one being check.html
3. Open check.html in the above folder using MS Word.
4. Go to Tools --> Spelling and Grammar, to perform checking.
5. Note that any changes made are only in the file check.html. You will need to update your original Latex file separately.

Possible problems

aspell

You can check the availability of aspell by typing:

aspell --version

[Please note the double hyphens, '--'.] If it is available, then you should see something like:

@(#) International Ispell Version 3.1.20 (but really Aspell 0.60.6)

latex2html

You can check the availability of latex2html by typing:

latex2html --version

If it is available, then you should see the message:

This is LaTeX2HTML Version 2008 (1.71)
by Nikos Drakos, Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds. 

You can let TeX (rather luaTeX) do the spell checking for you! For example, in ConTeXt MkIV, you can use

\loadspellchecklist[en][wordlist.txt]
\setupspellchecking[state=start]

where en is the current language (you can set different word lists for different languages), and wordlist.txt is a sorted list of correct words. For a complete example, see the ConTeXt wiki

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