Re: Spell checking a Lout document?

[Mark Summerfield]

On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 02:30:39 -0700
Daren Scot Wilson <address@hidden> wrote:
> I have just finished writing my great 15,000 page magnum opus, full
> of genius math, tables, and so on, entirely in Lout.  Hundreds of
> *.lt files @Included in a main Lout file.  Now, before I vanity
> publish it and try to sell a copy to Mom, I wonder if I've made any
> silly little typos.
> 
> What are practical ways to spell-check these .lt files?   Obviously
> an ordinary everyday spell checker will barf on all the @Something
> Lout keywords and maybe trip over the punctuation marks, although
> most of this source text is just regular text which could go through
> a spell checker fine.
> 
> Perhaps there's a filter that can extract all the straight text, 
> preening out simple markups such as @I, and bypassing all the
> structural stuff and non-text like sections, math, tables etc.,
> making a simple text file one can check?   OTOH, maybe there's a way
> to spell check the final .ps or .pdf file?  (Besides paying some
> unfortunate Human to proofread it.)
> 
> I'm on Linux so naturally I prefer solutions that would work on that 
> platform, or multiplatform.

I don't know of any nice way to do this directly with lout files (and
I've looked and I've tried!). Lout has no BNF and is a nightmare to
parse.
 
The solution I've now switched to is to use my own ViewPDF program. This
is just a very simple PDF viewer but it highlights spelling mistakes and
a couple of other possible problems (e.g., double words). It is free and
open source and easy to build on Linux once you have installed all the
-dev libraries it needs:
http://www.qtrac.eu/viewpdf.html
(I'd be interested to know how you get on with it.)

BTW At the moment if you add words to your own list (words.lst) they are
handled case-insensitively.

-- 
Mark Summerfield, Qtrac Ltd, www.qtrac.eu
    C++, Python, Qt, PyQt - training and consultancy
        "Advanced Qt Programming" - ISBN 0321635906
            http://www.qtrac.eu/aqpbook.html