vim spell checking - comments only in LaTeX files

Question

I use gvim to edit LaTex .tex file. I noticed that it checks spelling on the fly only for the commented text. If I have a mistake in a regular text - no underline. If I comment this text with % , the misspell is underlined immediately. What is wrong? Is there any strange option turned on?

Solution 1

The latex ft plugin conveniently defines this behaviour.

SpellChecker : Spell check text including LaTeX documents

Using latexmk, vim spell checking and vim latex-suite

There is an option that appears to come close:

:syntax spell [toplevel | notoplevel | default]

Update

Also

:he ft-tex-syntax

has very useful tidbits, like

Don't Want Spell Checking In Comments? ~

Some folks like to include things like source code in comments and so would
prefer that spell checking be disabled in comments in LaTeX files.  To do
this, put the following in your <.vimrc>: >
      let g:tex_comment_nospell= 1

You'll have to figure out whether you can use that/extrapolate from there

Solution 2

I had the same problem (VIM 7.3), but this post at the vim-latex-devel mailing list provided the clue. To get the spell checking working, I had to put

syntax spell toplevel

in my ~/.vimrc, but it has to be declared after

syntax enable

or

syntax on

for it to work.

Solution 3

I don't whether this is a crude hack and the intended solution, but I created a file called .vim/after/syntax/tex.vim containing the single line:

syn match texText "\<\w\+\>" contains=@Spell

Now vim spell checks the normal text between the commands and the text passed as parameters, because you cannot differentiate them syntacticly:

\frametitle{TextToBeChecked}
\pgfuseimage{VariableNotToBeChecked}

Hence, it checks way too much in my preamble. But I have it located in another file, so I don't really care.

Solution 4

This problem often occurs when working with files which are included by a master document.

If you are opening a TeX file which will be included and does not contain a section, chapter, \begin{document}, ... you can mark it by adding %begin-include at the top of the file. This way vim recognizes the file content as being part of the texDocZone region, which enables spellchecking.

With %end-include you can set the end of the texDocZone.

This behavior seems not to be documented, but is described in the vim syntax file: https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/runtime/syntax/tex.vim

tl;dr: Add %begin-include to the top of your tex file.

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