Consistent spelling #

What is consistent spelling? #

You can use LinTeX to validate that your spelling is consistent throughout your document. This is done by defining a list of words with their correct spelling, as well as a regular expression, that captures all alternative spellings.

LinTeX is not a spell checker!

Do not confuse this with a regular spell checker, that checks all words for orthography! Use another tool for this, e.g. LTeX.

As an example we’ll use the word colour, which is well known to be spelled color in American English, but colour in British English.* In a paper that’s supposed to be written in British English, we would want to make sure to always use colour and never color.

* This is not a great example, because ideally you’ll have your actual spell checker configured to either American or British English and identify this for you, but it’s just an example.

Configuration #

First, make sure that your configuration file exists as .lintex/config.toml. If it doesn’t, create an empty file at this location.

To activate spell checking, add a list under the key spellcheck:

spellchecks = [
	{ correct = "colour", regex = "colou?r" },
]

Each list element is a mapping with two keys: correct denotes the correct spelling, that is supposed to be used; regex denotes a pattern, that matches all possible spellings that might be used.

After saving the file, LinTeX will check for the correct spelling on the next run. To test it, let’s create a LaTeX file, that contains both spellings.

color colour

Running LinTeX on this file shows

$ lintex
test.tex:1:0
spelling/colour: Spelling: colour
   1: color colour
   2:
Check that 'colour' is spelled correct.