LanguageCheck

Analyses scientific LaTeX papers, suggesting improvements from a list of common mistakes/ambiguities, tense consistency, a vs. an, spell check, and paragraph topic sentences.

Package 110 stars GitHub

Language checking for scientific papers

This program attempts to assist you in improving your paper before submission.

Features

Can analyse any LaTeX papers, and Overleaf projects.
Makes automated reports to point you to improvements:
- Word level:
  - find common grammar mistakes, like wrong prepositions
  - find wordy phrases and suggest replacements
  - a vs an
  - spell-check (using hunspell)
- Sentence level:
  - find long, wordy sentences
  - check topic sentences
- Paragraph level:
  - find tense inconsistencies
- Paper level:
  - check visual impression of paper
All analysis is done offline -- your text does not leave your computer.
Supports British and American English, but focusses on issues applying to both.

Note that there are false positives -- only you can decide whether a change would make sense, the reports only point out potential issues.

If you find some rules useless (too many false positives), or you want to add more, please send a pull request!

Demo output

Example analysis (of an early draft of this paper <http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017MNRAS.465.4348B>_):

Example report for misused phrases <https://johannesbuchner.github.io/languagecheck/demo/agnpaper.txt_tricky.html>_
Overview of all reports <https://johannesbuchner.github.io/languagecheck/demo/agnpaper.txt_index.html>_

Requirements

python
convert command (ImageMagick): Install with your distribution
nltk: Install with pip
nltk data: Install with python -m nltk.downloader all
detex command (usually comes with LaTeX)
pyhunspell (optional): Install with pip

Installation

These commands should not give you an error::

$ which convert
$ which python
$ which detex
$ which hunspell
$ ls /usr/share/hunspell/{en_US,en_UK}.{dic,aff}

Then install the python packages and data::

$ pip install pyhunspell  --user
$ pip install nltk  --user
$ python -m nltk.downloader cmudict stopwords punkt_tab averaged_perceptron_tagger_eng

Usage

Using directly:

create PDF from your latex file -> mypaper.pdf
- For example, run "pdflatex mypaper.tex"
use detex to create pure text file -> mypaper.txt
- For example, run "detex mypaper.tex > mypaper.txt". You need detex installed.
- This does not capture figure captions. The detex.sh script can help you include those texts, "bash detex.sh mypaper.tex". You still need detex installed
run $ python languagecheck.py mydir/mypaper.txt mydir/mypaper.pdf
open with a web browser mypaper_index.html to see all reports

Using with Overleaf::

$ bash languagecheck_overleaf.sh <overleaf_url> <name of tex file>
# for example:
$ bash languagecheck_overleaf.sh https://www.overleaf.com/123456789 mypaper.tex