I haven’t played with this personally yet, but since I will be working on a paper for publication shortly, it looks like this might come in very handy. A Dr. Figueroa-Centeno in the Department of Mathematics in Hawai`i has posted instructions for getting the LaTeX syntax checker, ChkTeX, running under MacOS X. It doesn’t look terribly difficult. He includes instructions and a script for BBEdit integration, which makes me a happier BBEdit user. To quote from the ChkTeX website:

[ChkTeX] has been written in frustration because some constructs in LaTeX are sometimes non-intuitive, and easy to forget. It is not a replacement for the built-in checker in LaTeX; however it catches some typographic errors LaTeX oversees. In other words, it is Lint for LaTeX.

Looks promising for me. I use Splint when C programming (I installed splint via MacPorts using the command line sudo port install splint), so the idea of a Lint for LaTeX is appealing. I’ll be visiting Dr. Figueroa-Centeno’s website on ChkTeX on Mac OS X for full details on installing it, once I get a break from teaching.