spellcheck

This filter checks the spelling of words in the body of the document (omitting metadata). The external program aspell is used for the checking, and must be present in the path.

Why use this instead of just running aspell on the document's source? Because this filter is sensitive to the semantics of the document in ways that aspell is not:

• Material in code spans, raw HTML, URLs in links, and math is not spell-checked, eliminating a big class of false positives.

• The filter is sensitive to the lang specified in the document's metadata; this will be treated as the default language for the document.

• It is also sensitive to lang attributes on native divs and spans. Thus, for example, in an English document, [chevaux]{lang=fr} will not be registered as a spelling error.

To run it,

pandoc --lua-filter spellcheck.lua sample.md

A list of misspelled words (or at any rate, words not in the appropriate dictionary) will be printed to stdout. If the word is in a div or span with a non-default lang attribute, the relevant language will be indicated in brackets after the word, separated by a tab.

To add words to the list for a language, you can add files with names .aspell.LANG.pws in your home directory. Example:

% cat ~/.aspell.en.pws
personal_ws-1.1 en 0
goopy