minor editorial comments

[K. Berry]

    [the the]

    Anyone knows a good spell checker which would catch somthing like that?

Nelson Beebe just mentioned his dw (doubled-word) program in another context:


Date: Wed, 1 Nov 1995 15:33:33 -0700 (MST)
From: "Nelson H. F. Beebe" <beebe@math.utah.edu>
To: mackay@cs.washington.edu
Cc: beebe@math.utah.edu, Sebastian Rahtz <s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk>,
        karl@cs.umb.edu, m.GOOSSENS@cern.ch, monohon@tug.org,
        norm@jasper.ora.com, schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de
Subject: Re: goodies for TUG Unix CD

Sebastian Rahtz writes:

>> dt2dv dv2dt lacheck ps2pk t1ascii t1binary unpost
>> which i'd hate to be without on a daily basis.

To those, I would add my own

	dw
	chkdelim

The first checks for doubled words (which it found in both the TeX and
LaTeX books before anyone else uncovered them), and the second checks
for delimiter balance problems (braces, brackets, parens, dollar
signs).

The first is available from ftp.math.utah.edu:/pub/misc/dw.shar; I've
not packaged chkdelim yet for distribution, but could easily do so if
you'd like to try it out.  It is a member of a suite of utilities that
I wrote to demonstrate the use of UNIX lex/GNU flex in a course that I
taught.  I've found chkdelim enormously useful for C, C++, awk,
BibTeX, TeX, ... 


========================================================================
Nelson H. F. Beebe                  Tel: +1 801 581 5254
Center for Scientific Computing     FAX: +1 801 581 4148
Department of Mathematics, 105 JWB  Internet: beebe@math.utah.edu
University of Utah                  URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe
Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA
========================================================================

Date: Wed, 1 Nov 1995 19:29:31 -0700 (MST)
From: "Nelson H. F. Beebe" <beebe@math.utah.edu>
To: mackay@cs.washington.edu, s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk, karl@cs.umb.edu,
        m.GOOSSENS@cern.ch, monohon@tug.org, norm@jasper.ora.com,
        schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de
Cc: beebe@math.utah.edu
Subject: chkdelim, dw, et al

At Karl Berry's request, I've put together a distribution containing
chkdelim, dw, and some other programs.  These all hang together in the
sense of having been presented that way in a course that I teach, and
can be built from a single top-level make.  You can find them on 
ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/misc/lex-tools.{trz,tar-lst}.  (.trz == .tar.Z).

I've supplied full source code for bootstrapping on non-UNIX systems, and
both raw and PostScript versions of UNIX manual pages for them.  I've written
a new top-level README file that describes the collection in more detail,
and suggests what you might want to use it for.

Most of my Makefiles for TeX documents contain steps to run spell, ispell,
and dw, and I routinely use lacheck, chkdelim, and tex-pretty (ask about
the latter if you are interested -- it is not in the ftp tree yet) on
source code for finding problems, and cleaning up the appearance.

Karl has an excellent idea for a extension of chkdelim: checking for
balanced quotes, both in the TeX sense, and in the UNIX shell sense.
For now, it is left as an exercise for the reader, but maybe I'll
get time to do it myself one day.  In the meantime, enjoy....