Tools to Check Grammar in IETF Draft

This page lists a couple of tools and techniques to check the English grammar and spelling in XML or MarkDown? IETF drafts.

The use of such a tool is highly recommended to ease the reading and the understanding of documents. Authors should use one of these tools before submitting a draft.

Note: this list was compiled in 2020 by the IETF community and includes generic tools on the Internet and specific tools (often make by IETF authors).

Generic Tools

Those tools do not always understand the structure of IETF draft and often require a TXT files without page headings (use xml2rfc --raw to get such a TXT file).

GNU spell (no grammar check)

​http://aspell.net/ is a well-known spell checker. It has a filter for HTML/SGML that basically works with XML with the option -H or --mode=html.

Codespell (no grammar check)

​https://github.com/codespell-project/codespell works on MD, XML and TXT (and more) but it does not check grammar.

Grammarly

​https://www.grammarly.com/grammar-check of course not working directly on XML

Specific Tools Provided by the Community

This list includes all tools developed by IETF participants for their specific needs; they are tailored for the IETF but are offered 'as it is'.

idreview

This tool ​https://eggert.org/software/idreview is provided by ​Lars Eggert:

https://eggert.org/software/idreview has some scripting around languagetool that boils down to something like this:

rfcstrip "$id" | \
sed -e 's/^[ ]\{1,\}//g; s/[ ]\{2,\}/ /g; s/^o /\* /' | \
languagetool -l en-US -d ARROWS,COMMA_PARENTHESIS_WHITESPACE,COPYRIGHT,\
DASH_RULE,DOUBLE_PUNCTUATION,EN_QUOTES,\
MULTIPLICATION_SIGN,PLUS_MINUS,PUNCTUATION_PARAGRAPH_END,\
THREE_NN,UPPERCASE_SENTENCE_START,WHITESPACE_RULE,\
WORD_CONTAINS_UNDERSCORES

There are still a bunch of false positives, often due to ASCII diagrams, etc.

And if you want to work on the XML, you can use --xmlfilter and pass it an XML file instead of the rfcstripped/sedded text version.

xml2docx

This tool ​https://github.com/evyncke/xml2docx converts an IETF draft XML into a Office Open XML .DOCX that is then suitable for grammar checking by commercial package such as Microsoft Word. An online version is available at ​https://www.vyncke.org/xml2docx/ .

idspell (no grammar check)

​https://tools.ietf.org/tools/idspell/idspell.pyht written by Hendrik Lekowetz in 2006 and relying on GNU ​aspell hence does not check for grammar errors.

rfclint (no grammar check)

​https://github.com/ietf-tools/RfcEditor/tree/master/rfclint also uses ​aspell hence does not check for grammar errors.