John C. McCabe-Dansted wrote:
I am working on a grammar checker for LyX. It outputs the errors to LaTeX .log format so it can integrate itself into LyX without need for any modification to existing LyX binary.
Very interesting. I've talken a look at the code - although it's Perl, it is kind of readable. I stumbled upon a misspelled "hypen" somewhere, which probably should be "hyphen".
Regarding your questions: It might be easier to mimic "chktex" rather than LaTeX. LyX has support for doing "semantic"/"typographical" checking using chktex. This is much more like what you are doing, so that will be the easier road, I think.
Your checks about spaces before and after math are already covered by chktex, so before you go implement all kinds of checks, it will be a good idea to check out chktex to avoid duplicating work.
Thirdly, is there any interest in including this in an official release (it is under 50KB), and if so is there some procedure I should follow?
Get it to work as you want it to, and submit a patch. You probably have to tie it into the configure-machinery, since it requires Perl, which I believe we do not require anymore (at least not in 1.4-devel, where reLyX is dead.) I'm sure someone can give you a few pointers for this.
Notice, however, that there is a feature freeze for 1.4, so you might have to hang on to your patch until general development opens again, probably some time next year. On the other hand, this might give you time to reimplement this stuff as C++, which I'm sure would increase the chances for the code to be included.
Regards, Asger
