[OS X TeX] cocoaspell and latex

[Herbert Schulz]

> On Sep 20, 2018, at 2:50 PM, Themis Matsoukas <tmatsoukas at icloud.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Sep 20, 2018, at 8:18 AM, Herbert Schulz <herbs at wideopenwest.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 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. 
> 
> Excalibur used to manage math well. Unfortunately it is broken on High Sierra.
> 
> I run into another problem: In the cocoaspell preference pane, when I try to change the Suggestions mode from  Normal to anything else, the preferences crash. 
> 
> Themis

Howdy,

Sigh... I get the same crash here. I guess I've never tried to change that before!

Excalibur hasn't been updated in a very long time. It's still a Universal Binary; i.e., it still has PPC code mixed with 32 bit Intel code. Unless someone takes it up I expect it to completely die with macOS 10.5 (the one after Mojave). It also expects ASCII input and folks are moving over to UTF-8 Unicode at an accelerating rate.

Even though cocoAspell is a 64 bit application it does have problems, as you've noticed, and can use updating too. I believe it depends upon an internal version `make` to build the dictionaries and that fails which seems to be the main reason for installation problems.

In either case I believe someone (any volunteers?) needs to take them on, bring then up to date and fix bugs. I suspect Excalibur has such old code that it would need to be  re-created from the ground up.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)