TexCop

CLI and static code analyzer for TeX files.

TexCop provides CLI commands for the most commonly used tasks when working with LaTeX, e.g., generating a .gitignore file, creating the final pdf and validating the .tex and .bib files.

Only works for UTF-8 encoded .tex and .bib files.

Works best when

• the citation style is numeric/alphanumeric.
• each sentence is in its own line.
• your texts are written in English
• labels in tables/figures should be put right after the caption
• does not work that well if you define a lot of custom macros for abbreviating latex commands
• all files are in UTF-8 and use .tex file ending

Installation

Requires JDK 8 with JAVA_HOME set to the JDK path!

$ git clone https://github.com/stefan-kolb/texcop.git
$ cd texcop
$ ./gradlew installDist
# add texcop/build/install/texcop/bin to PATH

Usage

# in your latex directory
$ texcop pdf # create the pdf with pdflatex and bibtex using main.tex as the starting file
$ texcop validate # validates all .tex and .bib files
$ texcop clean # remove all generated files like .div, .pdf, .log, ...

Commands

texcop [command]

 cites                        Print used cites
 clean                        Removes all generated files during a tex build
 create-gitignore             creates a latex project specific .gitignore file
 help                         prints usage information
 minify-bibtex-authors        replace three or more authors with et al. in bibtex entries
 minify-bibtex-optionals      removes optional keys in bibtex entries
 pdf                          creates pdf with pdflatex, including bibtex; logs to texcop-pdf.log
 pdfclean                     executes pdf and clean commands in sequence
 texlipse                     generates texlipse project files
 texniccenter                 generates the texniccenter project files
 validate                     executes validate-latex and validate-bibtex commands in sequence
 validate-acronym             detects unmarked acronyms in text
 validate-bibtex              validates all .bib files for the existence of certain fields
 validate-labels              detects unused labels
 validate-latex               validates .tex files
 validate-links               detects malformed and unreachable urls
 version                      prints the current version

Configuration

Via .texcop.yml.

Copname:
  Enabled: false

Via inline comments.

% texcop:disable Style/AmericanEnglish, Style/KeyboardWarrior
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
% texcop:enable Style/AmericanEnglish, Style/KeyboardWarrior

Automatically Generated Configuration

For the first run of texcop it is a good idea to use texcop validate --auto-gen-config to generate the .texcop.yml file including all found offenses. The generated file includes configuration that disables all cops that currently detect an offense in the code. After that, you can start removing the disabled cops from the generated file one by one to work through them independently and not get overwhelmed by the amount of initial offenses.

Usage with CI

Running texcop will return a system status code different from zero if any offenses were found. Therefore, you can use it with a CI server like Travis or CircleCI. You may use the following build.gradle file for now. The build will fail, if there are any style violations detected.

apply plugin: 'java'

buildscript {
    repositories {
        jcenter()
        maven { url 'https://jitpack.io' }
    }

    dependencies {
        classpath 'com.github.stefan-kolb:texcop:master-SNAPSHOT'
    }
}

task texCop(type: JavaExec) {
    classpath = buildscript.configurations.classpath
    main = "texcop.Main"
    args 'validate-latex'
}
test.dependsOn texCop

Add your own custom cops

The easiest way to add your own cops is to add a new RegEx cop to any YAML file, e.g., style.yml. Just add your checks for typical typos or custom validations.

Style/StefanKolb:
  Message: "Stefan Kolb's style set"
  Match:
    - "amongst" # use among instead
    - "independently from" # independently of
    - "faster time" # shorter time
    - "(on-premise |on premise )" # on premises
    - "\\b[aA]ll of the\\b" # all the
    - "period of time" # period
    - "\\bat al\\b" # et al

Credits

Inspired by Rubocop. Based on Textools.