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Admittedly, I am spoiled by having my nice red and green squiggles in word, and I write my LaTeX documents in an editor that supports some of these features (TeXStudio if it matters).

However, I have come to appreciate how much (in terms of grammar and spell checking and suggestions) Word (and I'm sure other products as well) do, and I find it distinctly lacking in my IDE.

Word has interop capability that allows other programs to call its functions that perform these roles.

I have two primary questions:

  1. Are there any programs that actually do this (with Word, or any other API type calling, but with visual, real time output (squiggles))?
  2. Are there any IDEs that support adding these types of hooks? The actual code to make this work (at least with word interop) is very small, and if there exists a way to add the hooks I would be willing to code it (and share of course).

To Clarify: 1) this is about grammar, not just spelling. 2) This is about the IDE experience, not output.

soandos
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  • Is the problem basically grammar checking? I always switched that off in Word as I found it useless but probably it has improved. If so, perhaps you could clarify that in the question. If not, I've never had any trouble getting on-the-fly spell checking to work in the editors I've used. (That is, the squiggles which appear as you type.) The only minor annoyance is that my current editor is just a tad too trigger happy and starts marking a word as incorrect before you've finished typing it (possibly correctly). However, that's a very minor niggle. – cfr Jun 08 '14 at 20:06
  • @cfr its grammar, spelling, and optionally, using the dictionary edits I've already made (autocorrect, add words to dictionary, etc) – soandos Jun 08 '14 at 20:07
  • Have you seen http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/6333/grammar-checking-tool-for-use-with-latex?rq=1? Also http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/15/spell-checking-latex-documents?rq=1. – cfr Jun 08 '14 at 20:07
  • @cfr I did an several other questions as well. As far as I could tell, they mostly did the checking on the side and then revised the document. Nothing there really gave squiggles or called out for the checking – soandos Jun 08 '14 at 20:09
  • I have no issue getting TeXStudio to use squiggles but I am using GNU/Linux so perhaps that's different. I probably had to enable the option at some point. TeXStudio is rather annoying, though, because it uses its own dictionaries etc. rather than using enchant which means it doesn't know any of the words in my personal dictionaries and cannot check Welsh. In Kile, I don't have this issue. I guess it is using either aspell directly or aspell via enchant and it lets me adds words, remembers them, filters macros and add squiggles. – cfr Jun 08 '14 at 20:23
  • Perhaps http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/48035/how-to-disable-spell-checking-or-equivalent-features-in-texmaker-texstudio?rq=1 will help. (Presumably you can reverse the instructions.) – cfr Jun 08 '14 at 20:25
  • @cfr TecStudio has some facility for this, but its not good. I am looking to keep the general editing experience (though I am willing to switch IDEs) if I get a much better checking experience – soandos Jun 08 '14 at 20:33
  • Also http://www.ctan.org/topic/spell. – cfr Jun 08 '14 at 20:34
  • @cfr but not grammar – soandos Jun 08 '14 at 20:34
  • I like Kile's spell checker despite my niggle. However, I suspect it is using enchant or aspell or similar so I am not at all sure whether the experience would be the same, worse or better on Windows. There is a post somewhere around about piping stuff to diction for grammar checking but that would involve working outside the editor, even if it works on Windows. Spelling shouldn't be an issue on GNU/Linux or OS X with a sensible editor which uses the system spelling facilities (i.e. not TeXStudio) but I just don't know for Windows. – cfr Jun 08 '14 at 20:38
  • Check out the spelling package. It requires LuaLaTeX but will give you visual feedback in the output indicating misspelled words. – Martin Heller Jun 08 '14 at 20:50
  • @MartinHeller see clarification – soandos Jun 08 '14 at 22:56
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    You may look at languagetool... and try to link it with your favorite editor. – Paul Gaborit Jun 08 '14 at 23:22

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