How to enforce hyphenation with vale?

[robertsawko]

Hi,

I started using Vale.sh for improving my LaTeX and Markdown - a really fantastic set of tools, many thanks. Unfortunately, I am having problem with one customisation that would be extremely useful to me. I want to spell Latin phrase "in situ" without a hyphen, but I catch myself writing "in-situ" all the time. I thought I could achieve this by using vocabularies, but after adding "in-situ" to reject.txt and "in situ" to accept.txt I am still getting false positives and negatives in my text. Specifically, Vale.sh does not highlight "in-situ" as a mistake and keeps telling me that "situ" is not a word.

I feel I am still misunderstanding how this works, or maybe there is a better way of enforcing this. Please let me know.

[jdkato]

It should work if you add (?<!-)situ to accept.txt and in-situ to reject.txt.

[robertsawko]

Thanks, that's definitely better, but it's still not quite what I am after. For instance "situ" without a preceding "in", should be an error as I am using it in an English text. "in situ" has a specific meaning in the technology I talk about about, but "situ" on its own does not. Sorry about being so particular on this.

Why does simple in situ in accept.txt doesn't work?

[jdkato]

Frankly, I'm having to do a lot of guesswork here: in your first message, you stated that:

Specifically, Vale.sh does not highlight "in-situ" as a mistake and keeps telling me that "situ" is not a word.

My suggestion addresses both of these points -- using "in-situ" will result in an error and the use of "situ" will not (it's not entirely clear to me what you meant by "not a word", but my assumption was that Vale.Spelling was raising an error).

Now, it appears you want:

1. "in-situ" -> error
2. "situ" -> error
3. "in situ" -> no error

In which case, from the perspective of Vale.Spelling, (2) and (3) are incompatible goals. Spell check operates individual words, so "situ" is either valid or not.

To achieve what you (appear to) want, you'll need to:

1. Add (?<!in )situ to reject.txt

2. Create a custom spelling-based rule that allows the use of "situ" only in the case of spell check:

   # Saved at <StylesPath>/<YourStyle>/Spelling.yml
   extends: spelling
   message: "Did you really mean '%s'?"
   level: error
   filters:
     - situ

3. Replace the Vale.Spelling with your custom rule:

   StylesPath = styles
   MinAlertLevel = suggestion
   
   Vocab = YourVocab
   
   [*]
   BasedOnStyles = Vale
   
   YourStyle.Spelling = YES
   Vale.Spelling = NO

[robertsawko]

Thanks. That's a fair comment and apologies for being vague. The three points you list are exactly what I am targeting. I effectively want to forbid hyphenation of these two words, but unfortunately one of them is not standard English, so I don't want it to appear on its own. I must have read too much content with this phrase to take an outside view, when writing up my question. Sorry about this.

I think I followed your suggestion, but now I am not getting an error with "in-situ" (1). I've got YourStyle/Spelling.yml copied verbatim and I replaced Vale spelling. I've got (?<!in )situ in reject.txt and empty accept.txt.

Please let me know.