Today I discovered a nice tool for improving your scientific writing: Neil Spring’s style-check.rb. In a primitive but effective way (and aware of LaTeX markup!), it checks your document for the occurrence of typical style or syntax errors. These are implemented as a configurable list of regular expressions. style-check.rb reports any encountered errors like a compiler, with line and column number, according to the developer’s philosophy that writing is just a special case of coding. When executing the script manually, its output is somewhat hard to “process” for a human, so I thought, why not integrate it into Emacs. Emacs is prepared for dealing with compiler output, so the solution was straightforward: (more…)