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myst:
  html_meta:
    keywords: LaTeX,correcteur d'orthographe pour LaTeX,correcteur de grammaire pour LaTeX"
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# Spelling checkers for work with TeX

"Traditional" approaches to the problem (of checking your spelling) were designed to work with a plain text file; in our case, we have an (La)TeX source. For the user, this is a simple-to-understand way to do the job; but for the spell-checker programmer, it requires heuristic (and hence fallible) analysis of (La)TeX macros and so on. The alternative, of viewing the text *after* (La)TeX has processed the results, is covered below.

The user of an [shell/editor](/6_distributions/editeurs/start) will usually find it embeds a spelling checker. For command-line use, there are several choices, depending on the system you're using.

For Unix, [ispell](wpfr:ispell) was long the program of choice; it is well integrated with Emacs, and deals with some TeX syntax. However, it has more-or-less been replaced everywhere, by [aspell](wpfr:GNU_Aspell), which was designed as a successor, and certainly performs better on most metrics; there remains some question as to its performance with (La)TeX sources. The most recent offering (which is widely used in other open-source software projects) is [Hunspell](http://hunspell.sourceforge.net/). `Hunspell` is available for other architectures, too; a web search shows versions available for Windows, at least.

For the Macintosh, [Excalibur](http://excalibur.sourceforge.net/) has long been used; its distribution comes with dictionaries for several languages. `Hunspell` (see above) is actually part of OS X from version 10.6.

The VMS Pascal program <ctanpkg:vmspell> makes special cases of some important features of LaTeX syntax (it has [GitHub repository](https://github.com/rf-latex/vmspell), but is in fact frozen since 1994).

For MS-DOS, there are several programs. `Amspell` can be called from within an editor, and <ctanpkg:jspell> is an extended version of `ispell`.

An alternative approach takes (La)TeX output, and checks that. A straightforward approach is to produce PDF output, and process it with `pdftotext`, using any plain text checker on the result (the checkers listed above all work in this role). For this to work reasonably well, the user should disable hyphenation before making the PDF output.

The (experimental) LuaTeX/LaTeX package <ctanpkg:spelling> goes one step further : it uses `lua` code to extract words *while typesetting is going on*, but before hyphenation is applied. Each word is looked up in a list of known bad spellings, and the word highlighted if it appears there. In parallel, a text file is created, which can be processed by a "normal" spelling checker to produce a revised "bad spelling" list. (The package documentation shows the end result; it includes words such as "spellling, which are duly highlighted.)

Finally, [TeXspell](https://github.com/jeertmans/texspell) is a promising project by Jérome Eertmans. It relies on [LanguageTool](https://dev.languagetool.org/http-server.html) for grammar and spell checking, and [OpenDetex](https://github.com/pkubowicz/opendetex) for TeX document parsing. It's not yet fully usable but might be soon the most complete language checker for LaTeX documents.

:::{sources}
[Spelling checkers for work with TeX](faquk:FAQ-spell)
:::