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LaCheck(1)		     General Commands Manual		      LaCheck(1)

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 finds	bad  se-
     quences.  It should be noted, that the badness is very subjective.  LaCheck
     is designed to help find common mistakes  in  LaTeX  documents,  especially
     those made by beginners.

     The things checked are:

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

     Bad spacing including missing a `\ ' after an abbreviation, missing an `\@'
     before  a	punctuation mark in a paragraph that is ended by an capital let-
     ter, double spaces like `	', bad usage of ellipsis (like using ... instead
     of \ldots, or using \ldots where \cdots should be used), missing	before a
     \cite or \ref commands, space before footnotes, italic  corrections  before
     comma,  point, or italic text, italic correction after normal text, missing
     italic correction when switching from italic to  normal  text,  and  double
     italic correction.

     Badly placed punctuation marks around end of math mode delimiters. This is,
     punctuation placed right after display math end or punctuation placed right
     before  text  math  end.	Sequences  of whitespace 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  font  specifiers  arguments
     such as \em{text} are noted, and use of @ in LaTeX macros are reported.

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

     LaCheck may be invoked from within emacs(1) using M-x 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  an  end-of-
     sentence  space.	Also,  at line 179, the first space of the sequence " ~"
     should probably be deleted.  The last two lines is an  example,  where  the
     user mistyped, and probably inserted an extra "}" somewhere.

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

     A mismatch error may cause more to follow, due to the lack  of  good  error
     recovery.	In  such  cases,  just	correct  the first error 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-like  en-
     vironments called something else than exactly `verbatim'.

SEE ALSO
     tex(1), emacs(1), latex(1)

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 or off, does
     not like TeX at all, does not provide any	options  to  turn  off	specific
     warnings, and is at best a crude approximation.

     Ideas  for  improvements  and bug reports are very welcome.  Such should be
     directed to the maintainers; please email tex-live@tug.org.

AUTHOR
     Kresten Krab Thorup with modifications by Per Abrahamsen.	Currently  main-
     tained as part of TeX Live (https://tug.org/texlive).

Release 1.30 (TeX Live) 	   2019-07-09			      LaCheck(1)

Want to link to this manual page? Use this URL:
<https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=lacheck&sektion=1&manpath=FreeBSD+Ports+15.1.quarterly>

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