Hunspell

Following the initial release of the updated Dyerhouse site on September 22, 2023, I tried running Hunspell from Make to ensure that I didn’t have any spelling errors in the public site.

I’ve been working on the updated Hugo site since late July, on and off between other projects and over lunch breaks. This work included extensive documentation of Pre-Kaddesol , the first conlang of Project Altravia to see the light of day.

Knowing myself and the kind of intermittent work I’ve been doing, I decided to run Hunspell to catch any spelling errors. My thought was that Hunspell might provide Regular Expression matching to ignore special characters in the Markdown and Hugo shortcodes to help me trim the non-English text that requires closer examination for correctness from the English text, which I can check programmatically.

Turns out Hunspell does not support this feature out the box and it took the better part of an hour to spellcheck the few hundred documents I have on this site. I’m also not entirely sure that this process didn’t break certain features or rewrite technical and linguistic terms under more common but incorrect phrasings.

It would be nice if I could pipe relevant inline text to Hunspell and ignore the irrelevant parts, but that would require migration to a custom parser and if I’m going to spend any time on that, I’d rather move to reStructuredText than remain on Markdown.