LaTeX Copy Editing – Using Aspell Interactive Spell Checker

I got feedback from my supervisor late last night –he’s clearly a night Owl. I’ve spent the last couple of hours going through his comments and there’re a number of suggested changes to be made in the three draft chapters I sent through to him. One thing was immediately clear: my manuscripts had tonnes of spelling and grammar mistakes… For some weird reason, Kile (my preferred LaTeX frontend)’s spell checker broke and with very little time, I decided to do it the old-school way –I manually ran aspell [1] on 126 TeX files that form part of my manuscript.

I’ve chunked up my manuscript into smaller manageable files [2] and currently have a total of 161 TeX files. I excluded all R Sweave auto-generated files (I follow a consistent naming convention& so it was easy to isolate Sweave generated TeX plot files from the rest) and looped through the remaining 126 TeX files using the command below.

for file in `find . -iname "*tex" | grep -v plot`
   do 
      aspell -c $file --mode=tex --lang=en_GB --add-tex-command="citep op"
   done

Bibliography

[1] http://aspell.net
[2] http://lightonphiri.org/blog/latex-source-code-formatting-using-listings-package