Spell Checking Lout Documents

[Steven R . Baker]

Hi everyone,
  There was some discussion about spell checking Lout documents a
while back, to which I suggested that a hack of ispell might work.
After looking over the ispell code, and more specifically it's support
for TeX, I have come to the conclusion that Lout may not be able to be
spell checked without parsing the entire document.

  I also experimented with some (Python!) code that simply stripped
everything following an @ symbol, and all of the braces, { and } and
then feeding that as plain text to ispell.  However, I was met with
the problem of parameters to certain commands.  Consider this:

{ 24p } @Font { Large text. }

  Which, when run through my script, is stripped to read this:

 24p  Large text. 

  And that is sent to ispell.  One can immediately see the problem.
Ispell will catch ``24p'' as an error in spelling and complain about
it.

  Of course, for shorter texts that don't use many of Lout's advanced
features, this is likely acceptable.  However, for anything slightly
more than trivial, it is useless.  I currently use Lout for doing my
homework, and have been simply living without a spelling checker,
though I don't want to do this forever.

  After failing at hacking ispell, and failing writing my own quick
hack, I looked closer into Lout.  I investigated the -p option (for
producing plain text) and tried piping that to Lout.  This works, even
though the formatted output is unfavourable for parsing, but yields
the problem of finding your mistakes in your source.  For example,
when ispell finds a mistake in my document, I then have to go into
Emacs, and search the buffer until I hit the right spot.  This is not
hard, but it would be nice to be able to tell ispell to replace my
errors in place.

  So, after various different approaches, I've come up (almost) empty
handed.  Has anyone else here tried anything differently?  Or perhaps
a mod to the Lout source tree itself could be added to read ispell's
dictionary as it compiles?

Thoughts would be appreciated.
-Steven

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