Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Spellchecking DocBook

[Michael Smith <smith@xml-doc.org>]

Ian Castle <ian.castle@looksystems.co.uk> writes:

> At one time (I've not used ispell for a long time) aspell had the
> "mode=sgml" option so that it didn't try to spellcheck inside tags.
> 
> ispell may well have this now though, so I don't know, but it didn't
> when I started using aspell.

The version (3.2.06) of ispell I use has a -H flag (H for HTML) which
just tells it to skip anything within angle brackets, and (I think) to
skip anything delimited by &/;.

So it works just as well for ignoring XML/SGML markup and entity
references during spellchecking. At least it seems to for me -- I
haven't run into any problems using it.

To get the equivalent of the -H option when calling ispell from within
Emacs, I just put this in my startup file:

  ;; don't spellcheck markup
  (setq ispell-skip-html t)

For me, ispell works just fine if the only thing you're expecting is
help _catching_ your spelling errors and aren't really looking for
much help _correcting_ them -- because while some of the possible
"corrected" spellings ispell suggests are useful I guess for their,
um, entertainment value, aspell is infinitely better (for English at
least) at figuring out what you're actually trying spell.



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