Best way to spellcheck inform 6 game?

Authoring Inform 6
1

Hii
I’m not native English but trying to make a game in English, so I’m sure to be making tons of spelling errors.
Does anyone know of any spell-checker (it’s fine if it’s a shell tool like ispell, aspell, codespell, etc) that will ignore programming language constructs and keywords, and only look at the strings?

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2

Have you tried the -r option of the compiler which allows you to record all the text to “gametext.txt” file?

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3

Thank you, I hadn’t heard of that one! It works, the resulting file does have quite a bit of jargon and internal names (I think from library error messages). But it absolutely works better than the raw inf.

Transcript of the text of "xenomusa.inf"
[From Inform 6.37 for Unix (in development)]

Xenomusa
^An interactive sci-fi story by Mara Huldra^
220219
6.12.6
a
---
the
CompassDirection
compass
north
(n_obj)
⋮
4

Inform Release Notes:

The setting $TRANSCRIPT_FORMAT controls the output format of the -r option. The default is still the same format as before, (and can be explicitly selected with $TRANSCRIPT_FORMAT=0), but $TRANSCRIPT_FORMAT=1 enables the new, more informative and machine-readable format.

You can also save your game file with UTF-8 encoding. Just put the %!-Cu option in the header of your game file (on the 1st line).

!% -Cu
!% $TRANSCRIPT_FORMAT=1
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5

Thanks, that significantly narrows down the number of extra words. With that I managed to construct a shellpipe abomination to run the check automatically

echo "[Misspelled or unknown words]"
grep "^G:" gametext.txt | cut -c 4- | aspell list -l en_US -p ./xenomusa-dict.pws | sort | uniq

Where *-dict.pws is a list of valid words specific to the game:

personal_ws-1.1 en 82 
ALDERSEEP
Argonautica
Astrid
CharacterGlulx
⋮
1 Like
6

Great, this will be very useful to me.
For the French language, we have the free Grammalecte extension for LibreOffice which is really useful for grammatical, spelling and typographic corrections. I don’t know if there is an English equivalent.

7

Oh good idea! I looked around and the closest equivalent for English grammar checking seems to be LanguageTool. There’s a plugin for LibreOffice and it can also be used from the command line or Python. I haven’t tried it yet though.