There are different tools for checking your spelling that support LaTeX and won't trip on its funny syntax. But they have different limitations with accents.

1 Two Popular Spelling Checkers

I can think of at least two popular spelling checkers commonly used in the UNIX world: ispell and Aspell. Although Aspell is said to be a replacement for ispell, it is not, for some things, as good as ispell which, in turn, is not as good as Aspell for some other tasks.

2 Ispell

Ispell is particularly useful when you typeset accents with backslashes with L^AT_EX , like \'e, \^o or \"e. However, it's not so good at handling Unicode accent characters (in which case Aspell should be favoured). Dictionaries are stored in /usr/lib/ispell. Personal dictionaries are cast into the ~/.ispell_default file. Usually, using ispell only involves the command and the input file:

ispell inputfile

But we're writing L^AT_EX and we need to tell ispell about it, as well as the language we're writing in – say French. That's respectively taken care of by the -t and -d options:

ispell -t -d french inputfile.tex

The default dictionary can be set by fiddling things in the /etc/dictionaries-common directory. Also note that an inputfile.bak backup file is made before altering the file.

3 Aspell

Aspell is skilled with Unicode characters, but much less so with L^AT_EX 's backslash accents like \'e, \^o or \"e. The basic usage is:

aspell -c inputfile

The -c switch stands for check. A personal word list is created in ~/.aspell.en.pws. A backup called inputfile.bak is automatically created. You needn't specify whether or not your file is a L^AT_EX document: Aspell should be smart enough to correctly guess so. To have it use the correct language, you'll have to pass option -d fr to achieve the same result as previously with ispell:

aspell -d fr -c inputfile.tex

4 References

• International Ispell
• GNU Aspell