[OS X TeX] MacOSX-TeX Digest, Vol 48, Issue 1

[Themis Matsoukas]

On Oct 1, 2011, at 3:27 PM, Murray Eisenberg wrote:

> I already looked at in the System Preferences, Spelling, Filters pane and then the TeX/LaTeX part. I see such things included as:
> 
>  newcounter, newcommand, pagestyle
> 
> Nonetheless, still in TeXShop, those commands are being flagged as misspelled!

Murray,

I stopped using Aspell because:

(a)  it is a pain to setup (too many preference panes, too may dictionaries)
(b)  dictionaries are ignorant of many standard technical terms (for example, autocorrelation)
(c)  it often fails to recognize inverted-letter typos like "betetr" ("better" is NOT among the suggested corrections, but "tetra" and "bidet" are) 
(d)  it  usually offers too many suggestions, so that locating the one that matches is a pain. 

So I trashed it and my workflow now is this:

1. I have turned off spell-checking in Texshop's preferences (preferences/source/editor). This has given me a peaceful source window with no ugly red underlines.

2. To correct typos, every once in a while I run Excalibur, a spell checker for latex that is bundled with Texshop. To run it, just drop a latex file on Excalibur. I have automated the process with an applescript (below), which I have saved as a macro in TS. With the latex source window active, call the script: this will close the source file and will run excalibur. You then have to open the source file manually again. 

This is not optimal but even though I am a bad typist and make lots of typos, it has worked pretty well for me (just finished a 500-page book and lived to talk about it). 

Here is the applescript:

--AppleScript


tell application "Excalibur"
	activate
	open POSIX file #FILEPATH#
        activate
end tell

tell application "TeXShop"
	close window 1
end tell