15
$\begingroup$

Anyone know a good grammar checker for LaTeX?

I find that by the time a paper is ready for submission that my small typos are invisible to me, because I have looked at it so many times already. Spell check catches some of the errors, but grammar check would catch more.

$\endgroup$
1
  • $\begingroup$ I feel like if this question was new today we'd immediately call to make it CW. I'm hoping some moderator can come along and wiki-hammer this $\endgroup$ Nov 18, 2011 at 15:01

10 Answers 10

27
$\begingroup$

The best grammar checker is Someone Else. If your paper is ready for submission then you should find someone to read it through before you do so.

$\endgroup$
2
  • 7
    $\begingroup$ Someone Else is too busy. $\endgroup$ Nov 18, 2011 at 13:44
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ Then offer to read one of their papers in return. Or bake them a cake. Or teach one of their lectures. Or show them how to draw fancy diagrams in TeX. $\endgroup$ Nov 18, 2011 at 21:32
11
$\begingroup$

Grammar checker? No. But spell checker? Yes. Emacs comes with an interface to aspell which works pretty well. I suspect a grammar checker would have a hard time with mathematical prose anyhow, as it is so different from the prose such programs are written for.

$\endgroup$
1
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ I use aspell from the linux command-line. It's fairly nice, and you can teach it to not get freaked out by your most frequently used technobabble. $\endgroup$ Nov 13, 2009 at 17:46
5
$\begingroup$

I write latex in vim. Latest versions have a built-in spell checker.

:set spell
$\endgroup$
3
$\begingroup$

There's plain old GNU diction which copes okay on LaTeX input files. It's not precisely a grammar checker, but does catch some things, and I've found it useful enough on my own writing. You may end up wanting to pipe its output into "grep -v", to ignore certain of its complaints.

$\endgroup$
1
$\begingroup$

For checking grammar, try LanguageTool. But it's not latex aware. I'd run some script to remove all latex commands and then check with LanguageTool.

$\endgroup$
1
$\begingroup$

you can convert your latex to html and then use one of the many grammar\spelling checkers available. That works quite nicely for me.

$\endgroup$
1
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ What do you use for converting your latex to html? $\endgroup$ Nov 29, 2009 at 22:24
1
$\begingroup$

I would cold-heartedly agree with the first post. The best way to check your grammar is to have somebody else proofread your paper for you. For the sake of completeness I will add that there were two old Unix tools for checking writing: style and diction.

http://dsl.org/cookbook/cookbook_15.html#SEC220

I personally have never used them.

@Yoo Removing LaTeX is fairly easy with sed for instance but there is a tool called detex which will do exactly that for you. However it is not 100% successful and I would still suggest that you read text document.

$\endgroup$
0
$\begingroup$

Yes, I was looking for that a week ago. I bumped into Excalibur. I'm not sure how good it is though. If I get the time I want a progam that does both, the problem is how to exclude the maths when doing the check. Problem with grammar is worst, you need a program that will treat some maths as objects of a sentence.. that should difficult.

$\endgroup$
0
$\begingroup$

The best grammar checker is another person as answered by @Andrew Stacey. But there are still other ways to help you check the grammars. By either converting the pdf file to word file or copying the contents in the pdf file into a word file, we can use the grammar check function provided in word.

$\endgroup$
0
$\begingroup$

I'm using BakomaTex. It has a buildt in spell checker that checks while you're typing (can be disabled).

$\endgroup$
1
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ Ah, but now we have the next problem, of how to spell check your MO posts. That doesn't seem to be "buildt" in yet ;) $\endgroup$ Nov 18, 2011 at 15:00

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.