Vim's spell check: Ignore abbreviations in acro package commands?

Question

The acro package introduces LaTeX macros like \ac{abc}, \acs{abc}, \acl{abc}, \acp{abc}, \acpl{abc}, \Ac{abc}, etc. Here, abc is the label for an acronym.

I manually extract the acronym labels from the acronym file and add them to my local en.utf-8.add file. The latter is specific to each report. It is not an ideal process because both the acronym file and en.utf-8.add are constantly changing.

Can someone suggest a more efficient way to have the spell checker ignore acronym labels?

Answer 1

Spellchecking is permitted only on syntax elements that accept sub-token of type @Spell. I don't remember the exact details. The syntax files have been patched ages ago now.

I wouldn't be surprised that \cite{} and other commands introduce an new syntax kind for the token within braces, and that token doesn't include the @Spell syntax cluster.

If you add a syntax match for acronyms, it should get ignored by spell checking as well. You can have a look at {rtp}/syntax/tex.vim. This should be the most efficient approach.

e.g.

" Dirty hack: we should define new texAcronymGroup and texAcronymZone instead
syn region texRefZone       matchgroup=texStatement start="\\[Aa]c[lp*]*{"  end="}\|%stopzone\>"    contains=@texRefGroup

Answer 2

If I'm reading the acro manual correctly, you have to define all acronyms in the preamble with \DeclareAcronym{abc}{properties}; if that's not correct you can adapt the code below to use \ac{} and others). Therefore, you could adopt the following strategy which will work independent of folding status, unlike using a macro:

1. Write a function that reads your tex file and extracts all of the acronynm ids. Then add these to the internal word list which won't pollute your spellfile.
2. Use an autocmd to execute this, I would suggest on BufEnter and BufWritePost is probably sufficient).

For example, in ftplugin/tex.vim:

function! SpellAddAcronyms()
    let l:lines = getline(1, "$")
    call filter(l:lines, {_, v -> match(v, '\\DeclareAcronym{') > -1})
    call map(l:lines, {_, v -> matchstr(v, '\\DeclareAcronym{[^}]*}')[16:-2]})
    for l:id in l:lines
        silent execute ":spellgood! " . l:id
    endfor
endfunction

augroup SpellAddAcronyms
    autocmd! * <buffer>
    autocmd BufEnter,BufWritePost <buffer> call SpellAddAcronyms()
augroup END

I use this strategy to add citekeys to the internal word list which otherwise get flagged as spelling errors.

Answer 3

I created a normal-mode macro, stored in register a, that searches the *.tex source file for acronym tags and performs a normal-mode zG on them: /\<[Aa]c[sl]\?p\?\*\?{\zs\i\+\ze}^MzG@a. The ^M is a carriage return, captured by preceding it with Ctrl+V.

I invoke the macro by 1G@a. The macro runs in a loop to capture all the acronym tags into the "internal word list...used for all buffers where 'spell' is set". Spell check then ceases to flag the tags as errors. I found that all folds have to be opened in order for the macro to catch all acronym tags.

I remove the tags from the internal word list by setting the encoding option. Since I don't actually want to change that option's setting, D. Ben Knoble suggested :let &l:encoding = &l:encoding, which works. The acronym tags become flagged again by spell check.

Note that setl encoding=&encoding does not work. It doesn't re-enable flagging of the acronym tags by spell check.