1LaCheck(1)                  General Commands Manual                 LaCheck(1)
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NAME

6       lacheck - a consistency checker for LaTeX documents
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SYNOPSIS

9       lacheck filename[.tex]
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DESCRIPTION

12       LaCheck  is  a general purpose consistency checker for LaTeX documents.
13       It reads a LaTeX document and displays warning messages,  if  it  finds
14       bad sequences. It should be noted, that the badness is very subjective.
15       LaCheck is designed to help find common mistakes  in  LaTeX  documents,
16       especially those made by beginners.
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18       The things checked are:
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20       Mismatched  groups  (braces),  environments  and  math mode delimiters.
21       When a mismatch is found, line numbers for both start and  end  of  the
22       mismatch  is  given. The error messages comes in pairs, one for the end
23       match and one for the beginning, marked  with  `<-´  and  `->´  respec‐
24       tively.
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26       Bad  spacing including missing a `\ ´ after an abbreviation, missing an
27       `\@´ before a punctuation mark in a paragraph that is ended by an capi‐
28       tal  letter, double spaces like `  ´, bad usage of ellipsis (like using
29       ... instead of \ldots, or using \ldots where \cdots  should  be  used),
30       missing      before  a  \cite or \ref commands, space before footnotes,
31       italic corrections before comma, point, or italic text, italic  correc‐
32       tion  after  normal text, missing italic correction when switching from
33       italic to normal text, and double italic correction.
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35       Badly placed punctuation marks around end of math mode delimiters. This
36       is,  punctuation  placed  right  after  display math end or punctuation
37       placed right before text math end.  Sequences of whitespace followed by
38       punctuation marks are also caught.
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40       Bad  use  of  quotation  characters,  i.e.  constructs  like "´word" or
41       "word`" are warned about, tabs in  verbatim  environments  are  caught,
42       certain  TeX  primitives are frowned upon, attempts to give font speci‐
43       fiers arguments such as \em{text} are noted, and  use  of  @  in  LaTeX
44       macros are reported.
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46       LaCheck will read files that are input using \input or \include.  Files
47       with suffix `.sty´ are omitted, as they probably will cause LaCheck  to
48       crash.
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50       LaCheck may be invoked from within emacs(1) using M-x compile.  To run:
51       M-x compile RET lacheck RET , and then C-x ` to parse the messages
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OUTPUT

55       The output is UNIX-error like, and may be parsed using Emacs(1) compile
56       mode. Here is a sample:
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58       lacheck compiler
59       "/usr/mef/compiler.tex", line 34: missing `\\\\ ´ after "etc."
60       "/usr/mef/compiler.tex", line 179: double space at " ~"
61       "/usr/mef/compiler.tex", line 186: <- unmatched "}"
62       "/usr/mef/compiler.tex", line 181: -> unmatched "$$"
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64       A  control space `\ ´ should be inserted at line 34, to prevent an end-
65       of-sentence space.  Also, at line 179, the first space of the  sequence
66       "  ~"  should  probably  be deleted.  The last two lines is an example,
67       where the user mistyped, and probably inserted an extra "}" somewhere.
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DIAGNOSTICS

71       Some special cases should be explained. In cases where a sentence  ends
72       with  something  that LaCheck thinks is an abbreviation an missing `\ ´
73       error may also occur, if the following sentence begins with a lowercase
74       letter.
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76       A  mismatch error may cause more to follow, due to the lack of good er‐
77       ror recovery. In such cases, just  correct  the  first  error  and  run
78       LaCheck again.
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80       Braces, environments and math mode must be balanced within a file.
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82       LaCheck  may be confused by unmatched stuff placed inside verbatim-like
83       environments called something else than exactly `verbatim´.
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SEE ALSO

86       tex(1), emacs(1), latex(1)
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BUGS

89       LaCheck gets confused by advanced macros, is fooled by  simple  macros,
90       can't  figure  out if you use a non-standard way to switch italic on or
91       off, does not like TeX at all, does not provide any options to turn off
92       specific warnings, and is at best a crude approximation.
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94       Ideas  for  improvements and bug reports are very welcome.  Such should
95       be directed to the maintainers; please email tex-live@tug.org.
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AUTHOR

98       Kresten Krab Thorup with modifications by  Per  Abrahamsen.   Currently
99       maintained as part of TeX Live (https://tug.org/texlive).
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103Release 1.30 (TeX Live)           2019-07-09                        LaCheck(1)
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