Remarks on Latex Spell Checking

This post focuses on some remarks how to improve the language of a (bigger) Latex document. A lot of the time technical issues (compiling, fixing syntax errors, adjusting images, tables, etc.) and the Latex typesetting itself ('How do I ... in Latex?') draw away a lot of the attention from the actual content of the document. I think that ordinary word processors like LibreOffice Writer have a significant advantage over Latex here, even though the result will not be so beautiful. This post discusses some techniques I found helpful to mitigate this problem.

You probably want to improve the quality of a document in several stages. There is (should be) spell checking happening on an everyday basis and after certain periods of time you will want to do bigger reviews to improve the overall consistency of the document.

The first thing would be to use the editors integrated spell checking capabilities. In Emacs I found Flyspell Mode quite convenient (M-x flyspell-mode). Otherwise ispell can be run from within emacs (M-x ispell-buffer). The downside of this is, that it will generate lots of false positives if you have a more technical document with lots of acronyms and technical expressions. Therefore it might be quite distracting to have lots of words on the screen marked.

Alternatively you might want to generate spelling reports for your whole document once in a while. The following short script can be used to generate a spelling report for several .tex files using Hunspell.

Usually bigger Latex documents will be spread over many different files. Finding some string in several files and opening every file that contains the string can be quickly accomplished by issuing:
$> find . -name "*.tex" | xargs grep "some word" -isl | xargs emacs

More sophisticated spell checking and grammar checking can be done using LanguageTool. Unfortunately it cannot be used with Latex directly. detex can be used to remove Tex commands from Latex files. This is a bit tedious, because it gives you lots of false positives, but you will probably discover some new language mistakes this way.
$> find ./chapters/ -name "*.tex" -exec detex -n {} \; >> doc_detexed.txt
$> java -jar LanguageTool.jar -l en-US -c utf-8 doc_detexed.txt > doc_languagetool_report.txt

Microsoft Office spell checking and grammar checking is superior to the tools mentioned above. To be able to open your Latex document in Microsoft Word, the tool latex2rtf can be used. Instead of compiling your document to PDF it generates an .rtf file. This is also an alternative to using detex, if you want to use Libre Office and LanguageTool. If you do not have access to an Microsoft Office installation, GDocs might also be an alternative.

Xournal allows you to annotate PDF documents. This is handy because directly writing annotations in the PDF allows you to really focus on the content and saves lots of paper if you would otherwise print intermediate stages of your document frequently.

Typesetting Word-By-Word Translations

Recently I was asked how to typeset documents with a word-by-word translation like the following:

Welche	Farbe	hat	der	gelbe	Bus?
Which	color	has	the	yellow	bus?

As I have learned, linguists have the fancy word Interlinear Gloss for this. There are several Latex packages available for this purpose. Among them is gb4e which I decided to use.

For simplicity it is assumed that the text to be 'glossed' is provided as a plain text file with sentences delimited by '.  ', '?  ' or '!  ' (2 spaces) and words separated by individual spaces. The implementation of a small script that creates a document with nicely aligned words is very straight forward. The dictionary needs to be provided as a .csv file.

Unfortunately the task can not be fully automated. Breaking text into sentences requires some knowledge about a specific language. So does breaking sentences into words. Ideally the dictionary should also have some capability to detect flections, etc. The script just generates a Latex file that can be modified manually.

The script can be downloaded here.

Using Latex to create a Bibliography with different categories

Have you ever tried to create a Latex bibliography with different categories, e.g. textbooks, internal documents, WWW? Fortunately the multibib package allows us to do so.



If your document class is book, scrbook or something similar, you will probably not going to be very delighted about the result. multibib does not much more than creating a new bibliography for each category. But in the document classes mentioned above, bibliographies are regarded as chapters, which have page breaks and an empty page after them.

To fix this, the definition of the bibliography command of your document class needs to be renewed to declare bibliographies as sections instead of chapters. If you happen to use scrbook, these style files might be helpful.