Typesetting with LaTeX requires an editor, such as TeXStudio, Kile and so on. Currently, there are millions of researchers that use LaTeX to write their papers, the number is even astonishingly large when it comes to hard sciences. LaTeX usage, especially in the scientific and technical research writing and publishing community is undoubtedly a progressive requirement. For some universities and publishing companies, LaTeX has become a de-facto standard. Hundreds of Journals use LaTeX with their own custom paper templates. LaTeX is preferred for many reasons, it produces high-quality documents in several formats, it is stable, flexible, scalable, cost-free, publisher-friendly, and more importantly, platform-independent. However, LaTeX offers unlimited customizable formatting options, and automatic updating of bibliography and references where switching between various formats can be achieved with just one command, see here!
Any writing tool, however, requires grammar checking, spell checking, and plagiarism detection applications on top of it for a seamlessly great writing style. No doubt the Grammarly.com grammar checker is gaining popularity in this area. This digital writing tool deploys artificial intelligence (machine learning and deep learning algorithms) and natural language processing to facilitate writing. Specifically, Grammarly application automatically detects potential grammar, spelling, punctuation, word choice, and style mistakes in writing, following common linguistic prescription, while flagging potential issues in the text, and suggesting context-specific corrections for grammar, spelling, wordiness, style, punctuation, and possible plagiarism. It currently works as an extension for multiple browsers, and also with email services, like Gmail, including several desktop environments, such as those with the Microsoft Office.
Unfortunately, Grammarly, even other well-known tools such as Language Tool (LanguageTool) does not friendly work with LaTeX. Apart from being a very great software for fashioning high profile documents, LaTeX has integrated packages that only offer very limited grammar checking, let alone plagiarism detection services.
Such LaTeX limitations have forced people to find indirect ways of using external editors for TeX document grammar enhancement. One way of checking grammar in a LaTeX document is to use detex (see also OpenDetex) to extract text from LaTeX, and then, employ any grammar checker integrated editor to work with the resulting document. Detex is free software that can remove TeX constructs from a TeX file. It recognizes the \input command. Detex assumes it is dealing with LaTeX input if it sees the string \begin{document} in the text. In this case, it also recognizes the \include and \includeonly commands and other more. Once TeX constructs are removed, it becomes easier for grammar checkers such as Grammarly, using a supportive editor to check grammar and spelling.
LanguageTool is another Open Source proofreading program for English, French, German, Russian, and more than 20 other languages. Language Tool is a Java application available in many repositories and platforms (see here), it integrates nicely with TeXstudio for LaTeX, see instructions for Windows operating system. This tool also interfaces well with emacs editor, and its usage is described on the respective GitHub repository. LanguageTool seems to also support vim, see https://github.com/vim-scripts/LanguageTool.
LanguageTool can be installed on Ubuntu Linux, via snap:
- sudo snap install languagetool
"A correction tool for LaTeX documents", teXtidote, is a free and os-independent tool, that requires Java, which has been claimed to work directly with LaTeX. It has the ability to remove markup from the TeX file and send the text to the Language Tool library. The LanguageTool then performs verification of both spelling and grammar in a number of languages, while keeping track of the relative position of words between the original and the grammar-checked text. It translates the messages from LanguageTool back to their proper original location in the LaTeX file. TeXtidote produces an HTML report by default, that shows the original sources, with the errors found by LanguageTool highlighted at the correct location, find out more from its GitHub repository.
See also plagiarism detection tools alternatives here.