Re: Ispell: Skipping part of text in texinfo-mode

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Arash Esbati <arash@gnu.org>
> Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2024 18:25:02 +0200
> 
> I wanted to spellcheck a .texi file with 'M-x ispell RET' (running
> hunspell) and it occurred to me that skipping part of text like in .tex
> files isn't available OOTB.  In my experiment, ispell didn't ignore
> anything and checked every Texinfo macro.
> 
> Having no clue about ispell.el, I managed to ease the pain with this
> change:

Thanks.  But there be dragons...

> +;;;###autoload
> +(defvar ispell-texinfo-skip-alists
> +  (let ((single-arg (regexp-opt '("acronym" "cite" "code" "command" "env"
> +                                  "file" "key" "option" "url" "var")

There are many more, no?  @samp, @sc, @item, @itemx, to mention just a
few.

> +        (skip-line (regexp-opt '("deffn" "defun" "defopt" "defvar"
> +                                 "findex" "vindex" "kindex" "cindex"
> +                                 "end "

Likewise here: @defmac, @defspec, and many others (see the Texinfo
manual).

> +      ;; Special arrangement for things like @kbd{C-(}
> +      ("@\\(?:kbd\\|samp\\){" . "[^@]}")

What about @kbd in general? and @key?

> +      ;; Envs to skip entirely
> +      ("^@\\(?:\\(?:small\\)?example\\|lisp\\|verbatim\\)" .
> +       "^@end \\(?:\\(?:small\\)?example\\|lisp\\|verbatim\\)")

Why "entirely"?  They frequently include comments, not just code.

> I presume there are some .texi writers here and I'd like to know how
> others handle this.

Very simple: press 'a' once on each directive you never want to look
at, and leave the rest for judgment calls.

> Is the change above useful for ispell.el?

To some degree, I guess.  I think we should take only the bare
minimum, the ones that we want _never_ to be marked as mis-spellings,
and leave the rest to the users.