next up previous
Next: Searching For and Inside Up: USING UNIX Previous: Comparing and Concatenating Files

Checking Spelling (spell, ispell)

The program spell will check the spelling of words in a file against a fairly large dictionary. For example, if you type
spell paper.tex
you will get a list of the words in the file paper.tex that could be misspelled. A problem with using this on a TeXfile is that TeXcommands come out as misspelled words.

One way out of this is to use the program ispell which is an interactive spelling checker. When the filename ends in a .tex, ispell ignores things that start with backslash. It will often give you suggestions about how to correct the spelling. The main things you need to know to use ispell are: ? to get a list of commmands, i (ignore) to keep a word as is, r to replace a word and the number of a selection to replace the word with that selection. When you tell ispell to ignore a word, the word will be placed in your personal dictionary (a file called .ispell_words). Words in this file will be treated as correctly spelled in all future spelling checks. If you want to ignore a word and not put it in your .ispell_words, you can use a instead of i .