Turn off Vim spellcheck in custom region

Question

I have the following definitions in a .tex file preamble:

\newcommand{\beq}{\begin{eqnarray}}
\newcommand{\eeq}{\end{eqnarray}}

If I then use \beq and \eeq to define an equation array region, spell checking is turned on in this region, where it would not be if I had used \begin{eqnarray} and \end{eqnarray}. I tried to turn off spell-checking in these custom regions using the method presented here, i.e. copy the $VIMRUNTIME/syntax/tex.vim file to ~/.vim/syntax and edit the file. I added a line like

syn region texZone start="\\beq" end="\\eeq\|%stopzone\>" contains=@NoSpell

to the file, but it didn't work, and spellchecking is not disabled between \beq and \eeq tags. I am very unfamiliar with Vim syntax files, so I don't know how to debug this or take further steps. Any thoughts on how to turn off spell check just in my custom region would be appreciated.

Answer 1

By placing that line by itself in ~/.vim/after/syntax/tex.vim instead of adding it to a copy of $VIMRUNTIME/syntax/tex.vim in ~/.vim/syntax/tex.vim, the spell checking behavior was disabled between \beq and \eeq tags as I wanted. Unfortunately, this line doesn't tell Vim it's a math region, so math syntax highlighting is different between these tags than it is between \begin{eqnarray} and \end{eqnarray} tags.