🚀 go-pugleaf

[First of all let me apologize if the following has been discussed to death,
but my mailer has inadvertantly  "set info-tex NOMAIL"  and then my
editor/mailer developed glitches that conspired to prevent me from correcting
that. (Apologies also for sending a message to info-tex that should have
gone to listserv; I was too frustrated to think straight.)]

There has been a bit of discussion on c.t.t. about spell checkers for TeX
under msdos and amspell has been one of those recommended. I have just started
using amspell and find it on the whole useful, but I find it gets confused
by a couple of situations. Both of these render it of considerably less use
than it might otherwise be. With the /t switch it is supposed to ignore
anything between pairs of $'s  and  $$'s  and between \[  and \]  pairs.
Moreover it is supposed to ignore any word beginning with a backslash.
However, in the following example (a common construction recommended by DEK)
$$ <math> \hbox{<text> $\ds <math> $ ... } ... $$
it flagged  "ds" as a possible misspelling. This should have been ignored
under three different criteria. (I carefully checked the file for balanced
use of $'s and $$'s, thinking that might be the trouble.)

I use plain TeX and define \[ and \] for my own purposes (as variable size
delimiters, always balanced). They occur inside math mode and cause amspell
to get out of sync, so that what is outside math mode does not always get
checked. (I tested this with a planted misspelling.)

These two problems cause me to run amspell without the /t switch and so it
flags most control words and sequences of letters in math. This would not
be terrible (the control words can be added to a dictionary) except that
the backslash is not treated as part of the word. Thus a dictionary entry
for "rm" means the mistyping of "rm" for "em" (an easy typo for me)
would not be flagged.

The manual is rather limited, so I would like to ask if anyone knows a
remedy. (That is, at minimum, a way to prevent the first error seemingly
caused by nested math modes. Or, when the /t switch is omitted, a way to
get it to treat "\rm " as a complete word distinct from " rm ".)

Dan Luecking