[OS X TeX] cocoaspell and latex

[Herbert Schulz]

> On Sep 20, 2018, at 4:42 AM, Themis Matsoukas <tmatsoukas at icloud.com> wrote:
> 
> As a newbie with cocoaspell I am running into some small but annoying problems. In my source file I have the equation $w(x;\xav) = xe^{x/\xav}$ and cocoaspell flags "xe" as a typo. The same expression in mail.app, which also uses cocoaspell, is *not* flagged. Shouldn't cocoaspell ignore math equations in texshop?
> 
> Themis

Howdy,

I get it flagged in both places. If you paste it into an mail the `Check as you Type' doesn't do it's check but if you run the cursor through the equation or ask for a Spell Check (Cmd-;) it gets highlighted. that explains the apparent anomaly.

I don't know why Aspell doesn't seem to do what you expect but this is my guess. That can be tricky because it's not always obvious what that means when the same thing starts and ends an equation $...$ since you can also have $$...$$ and \$ shouldn't be counted at all. Not only that but you sometimes have plain text within an equation (especially within display equations) and that should be checked. Doing the right job would probably slow down Spell Check quite a bit in documents with many equations. 

PS: I've shifted over to \(...\) and \[...\] for in-line and (un-numbered) display equations. In recent versions of TeX Live \(...\) can even be used in section heads, etc., since they are protected commands. The main advantage being the difference between the open and close commands. Unfortunately Aspell still flags the contents.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)