vim spell checking - comments only in LaTeX files

Question

I use gvim to edit LaTex .tex file. I noticed that it checks spelling on the fly only for the commented text. If I have a mistake in a regular text - no underline. If I comment this text with % , the misspell is underlined immediately. What is wrong? Is there any strange option turned on?

Answer 1

The latex ft plugin conveniently defines this behaviour.

SpellChecker : Spell check text including LaTeX documents

Using latexmk, vim spell checking and vim latex-suite

There is an option that appears to come close:

:syntax spell [toplevel | notoplevel | default] 

Update

Also

:he ft-tex-syntax 

has very useful tidbits, like

Don't Want Spell Checking In Comments? ~  Some folks like to include things like source code in comments and so would prefer that spell checking be disabled in comments in LaTeX files.  To do this, put the following in your <.vimrc>: >       let g:tex_comment_nospell= 1 

You'll have to figure out whether you can use that/extrapolate from there

Answer 2

I had the same problem (VIM 7.3), but this post at the vim-latex-devel mailing list provided the clue. To get the spell checking working, I had to put

syntax spell toplevel 

in my ~/.vimrc, but it has to be declared after

syntax enable 

or

syntax on 

for it to work.