Spell checking reStructuredText

Question

I'm writing and correcting API documentation in Sphinx using reStructuredText. Does anyone know of a good spellchecker that will handle this format, or a bunch of Unix/Linux tools that will allow me to use Aspell with it?

Answer 1

There's a Sphinx extension for spell checking. It uses enchant, rather than aspell, but perhaps you might find it useful.

https://github.com/sphinx-contrib/spelling

(formerly https://bitbucket.org/dhellmann/sphinxcontrib-spelling)

there's a blog article about it here:

https://doughellmann.com/blog/2011/05/26/creating-a-spelling-checker-for-restructuredtext-documents/

which explains how the extension was created, so if you're set on/stuck with using aspell specifically, maybe you can adapt it to aspell.

Answer 2

Since aspell has options for checking HTML and TeX files, you can spell-check some HTML or Tex produced by Sphinx. I imagine you could also use aspell on text output from Sphinx - assuming that removes any mark-up (e.g. asterisks) that might confuse aspell .