spellcheck extension for Quarto

This extension provides a filter to run Hunspell whenever a .qmd file is rendered and prints potentially misspelled words to the console.

The current version was amended by Amy Heather, based on earlier MIT-licensed work by John MacFarlane and forked from Christopher Kenny:

• John MacFarlane, spellcheck.lua in the Pandoc Lua filters repository: https://github.com/pandoc/lua-filters/blob/master/spellcheck/spellcheck.lua.
• Christopher Kenny, Quarto spellcheck extension repository: https://github.com/christopherkenny/spellcheck.

Amendments in this repository are also released under the MIT Licence.

Requirements

You must have Hunspell installed for this extension to work.

If you want to use British English, make sure the en_GB dictionary is installed as well as Hunspell itself. On Ubuntu and Debian, this is typically provided by hunspell-en-gb

Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install hunspell hunspell-en-gb

macOS with Homebrew:

brew install hunspell

Windows with Chocolatey:

choco install hunspell.portable

Installing the extension

From a directory with an existing Quarto file or project, run:

quarto add lintquarto/spellcheck

Quarto installs extensions locally into an _extensions directory alongside your project or document, rather than into a global library. If you use version control, you should commit the _extensions directory to your repository.

Using the extension

After installation, add the filter to your document YAML or your project-level _quarto.yml.

You can specify which language to use (default is British England en_GB).

You can also specify words to ignore.

In a document:

---
filters:
  - spellcheck
spellcheck-lang: en_GB
spellcheck-ignore:
  - ignoreme
---

In _quarto.yml:

---
project:
  type: default

filters:
  - spellcheck
spellcheck-lang: en_GB
spellcheck-ignore:
  - ignoreme
---

When the document is rendered, the filter prints possible misspellings to the console, for example:

Possibly misspelled words:
--------------------------
consol
listd
spelld
--------------------------

Running spellcheck

The extension will run when the document is rendered. A minimal example is provided:

quarto render example.qmd

To run it without running code:

quarto render example.qmd --metadata execute.eval=false

To run spellcheck via a GitHub action:

name: spellcheck

on:
  push:

jobs:
  spellcheck:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - name: Check out repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Set up Quarto
        uses: quarto-dev/quarto-actions/setup@v2

      - name: Install Hunspell
        run: |
          sudo apt-get update
          sudo apt-get install -y hunspell hunspell-en-gb

      - name: Run spellcheck render
        run: |
          quarto render . --metadata execute.eval=false