MAN page from CentOS 6 texlive-latex-2007-60.el6_7.i686.rpm

LaCheck

Section: Misc. Reference Manual Pages (1)
Updated: 09/22/15
Index

NAME

lacheck - A consistency checker for LaTeX documents.

SYNOPSIS

lacheck filename[.tex]

DESCRIPTION

LaCheck is a general purpose consistency checker for LaTeX documents.It reads a LaTeX document and displays warning messages, if it findsbad sequences. It should be noted, that the badness is verysubjective. LaCheck is designed to help find common mistakes in LaTeXdocuments, especially those made by beginners.

The things checked are:

Mismatched groups (braces), environments and math modedelimiters. When a mismatch is found, line numbers forboth start and end of the mismatch is given. The error messages comes inpairs, one for the end match and one for the beginning, marked with`<-' and `->' respectively.

Bad spacing including missing a `\ ' after an abbreviation, missingan `\@' before a punctuation mark in a paragraph that is ended byan capital letter, double spaces like ` ~', bad usage of ellipsis(like using ... instead of \ldots, or using \ldots where \cdotsshould be used), missing ~ before a \cite or \ref commands, spacebefore footnotes, italic corrections before comma, point, or italictext, italic correction after normal text, missing italic correctionwhen switching from italic to normal text, and double italiccorrection.

Badly placed punctuation marks around end of math modedelimiters. This is, punctuation placed right after display math endor punctuation placed right before text math end. Sequences ofwhitespace followed by punctuation marks are also caught.

Bad use of quotation characters, i.e. constructs like "'word" or"word`" are warned about, tabs in verbatim environments are caught,certain TeX primitives are frowned upon, attempts to give fontspecifiers arguments such as \em{text} are noted, and use of @ inLaTeX macros are reported.

LaCheck will read files that are input using \input or \include.Files with suffix `.sty' are omitted, as they probably will causeLaCheck to crash.

LaCheck may be invoked from within Emacs(1) using compile:

To run: M-x compile RET lacheck RET, and then C-x `to parse the messages

OUTPUT

The output is UNIX-error like, and may be parsed using Emacs(1)compile mode. Here is a sample:

lacheck compiler

"/usr/mef/compiler.tex", line 34: missing `\\\\ ' after "etc."
"/usr/mef/compiler.tex", line 179: double space at " ~"
"/usr/mef/compiler.tex", line 186: <- unmatched "}"
"/usr/mef/compiler.tex", line 181: -> unmatched "$$"

A control space `\ ' should be inserted at line 34, to prevent anend-of-sentence space. Also, at line 179, the first space of the sequence " ~" shouldprobably be deleted.The last two lines is an example, where the user mistyped, andprobably inserted an extra "}" somewhere.

DIAGNOSTICS

Some special cases should be explained. In cases where a sentence endswith something that LaCheck thinks is an abbreviation an missing `\' error may also occur, if the following sentence begins with alowercase letter.

A mismatch error may cause more to follow, due to the chosenalgorithm. In such cases just correct thefirsterror and run LaCheck again

Braces, environments and math mode must be balanced within a file.

LaCheck may be confused by unmatched stuff placed inside verbatim-likeenvironments called something else than exactly `verbatim'.

FILES

lacheck

BUGS

LaCheck gets confused by advanced macros, is fooled by simple macros,can't figure out if you use a non-standard way to switch italic on oroff, does not like TeX at all, does not provide any options to turnoff specific warnings, and is at best a crude approximation.

Ideas for improvements and bug reports are very welcome. Suchshould be directed to the maintainers, their email address is<auc-tex_mgrAATTsunsite.auc.dk>.

AUTHOR

Kresten Krab Thorup with modifications by Per Abrahamsen.

This document was created byman2html,using the manual pages.