hspell(1)							       Ivrix								 hspell(1)

NAME

       hspell - Hebrew spellchecker

SYNOPSIS

       hspell [ -acDhHilnsvV ] [file...]

DESCRIPTION

       hspell tries to find incorrectly spelled Hebrew words in its input files.

       Like  the  traditional  Unix spell(1), hspell outputs the sorted list of incorrect words, and does not (yet) have a more friendly interface
       for making corrections for you. However, unlike spell(1), hspell can suggest possible corrections for some spelling errors -  such  sugges-
       tions are enabled with the -c (correct) and -n (notes) options.

       Hspell  currently  expects  ISO-8859-8-encoded  input  files.  Non-Hebrew  characters  in  the  input  files are ignored, allowing the easy
       spellchecking of Hebrew-English texts, as well as HTML or TeX files.  If files using a different encoding (e.g., UTF8) are to  be  checked,
       they must be converted first to ISO-8859-8 (e.g., see iconv(1), recode(1)).

       The  output will also be in ISO-8859-8 encoding, in so-called "logical order", so it is normally useful to pipe it to bidiv(1) before view-
       ing, as in:

	      hspell -c filename | bidiv | less

       If no input file is given, hspell reads from its standard input.

OPTIONS

       -v     If the -v option is given, hspell prints emacs-oriented version information and exits.

       -vv    Repetition of the -v option causes hspell to also show some information on which optional features were enabled at compile time.

       -V     With the -V option, hspell prints true and human-oriented version information and exits.

       -c     If the -c option is given, hspell will suggest corrections for misspelled words, whenever it can find such corrections. The  correc-
	      tion  mechanism in this release is especially good at finding corrections for incorrect niqqud-less spellings, with missing or extra
	      'immot-qri'a.

       -n     The -n option will give some longer "notes" about certain spelling errors, explaining why these are indeed errors (or in what  cases
	      using this word is in fact correct). It is recommend to combine the two options, -cn for maximal correction help from hspell.

       -l     The  -l  (linguistic  information) option will explain for each correct word why it was recognized (show the basic noun, verb, etc.,
	      that this inflection relates to, and its tense, gender, associated Kinnuy, or other relevant information)

	      If Hspell was built without morphological analysis support, this option will only show the correct splits of  the  given	word  into
	      prefix + word, as the full information incurs a 4-fold increase in the installation size.

	      Giving  the  -c  option  in  addition  to  -l  results in special behavior. In that case hspell suggests "corrections" to every word
	      (regardless if they are in the dictionary or not), and shows the linguistic information on all those words. This can be useful for a
	      reader application, which may also want to be able to understand misspellings and their possible meanings.

       -s     Normally,  the  words  deemed  spelling  mistakes are shown in alphabetical order.  The -s option orders them by severity, i.e., the
	      errors that most frequently appear in the document are shown first.  This option is most useful for people helping to build hspell's
	      word list, and are looking for common correct words that hspell does not know yet.

       -a     With  the  -a option, hspell tries to emulate (as little as possible of) ispell's pipe interface. This allows Lyx, Emacs, Geresh and
	      KDE to use hspell as an external spell-checker.

       -i     This option only has any effect when used together with the -a option. Normally, hspell -a only checks the spelling of Hebrew words.
	      If  the  given  file  also  contains  non-Hebrew words (such as English words), these are simply ignored. Adding the -i option tells
	      hspell to pass the non-Hebrew words to ispell(1), and return its answer as an answer from hspell.  This allows  conveniently  spell-
	      checking mixed Hebrew-English documents.

	      Running  hspell  with  the program name hspell-i also enables the -i option. This is a useful trick when an application expects just
	      the name of a spell-checking program, and adds only the "-a" option (without giving the user an option to also add "-i"). The multi-
	      spell script supplied with hspell serves a similar purpose, with more control over encodings and which spell-checker to run for non-
	      Hebrew words.

       -H     By default, Hspell does not allow the He Ha-sh'ela prefix. This is because this prefix is not normally used in  modern  Hebrew,  and
	      generates many false-negatives (errors, like He followed by a possessed noun, are thought to be correct). The -H option nevertheless
	      tells Hspell to allow this prefix.

       -D base
	      Load the word lists from the given base pathname, rather than from the compiled-in default path. This is	mostly	used  for  testing
	      Hspell, when the dictionaries have been compiled in the current directory and hspell is run as "hspell -Dhebrew.wgz".

       -d, -B, -m, -T, -C, -S, -P, -p, -w, and -W
	      These options are passed to hspell by lyx or other applications, and are cordially ignored.

SPELLING STANDARD

       Hspell  was  designed to be 100% and strictly compliant with the official niqqud-less spelling rules ("Ha-ktiv Khasar Ha-niqqud", colloqui-
       ally known as "Ktiv Male") published by the Academy of the Hebrew Language.

       This is both an advantage and a disadvantage, depending on your viewpoint.  It's an advantage because it encourages a correct  and  consis-
       tent  spelling  style  throughout your writing. It is a disadvantage, because a few of the Academia's official spelling decisions are rela-
       tively unknown to the general public.

       Users of Hspell (and all Hebrew writers, for that matter) are encouraged to read the Academia's official niqqud-less spelling rules  (which
       are  printed  at the end of most modern Hebrew dictionaries, and an abridged version is available in http://hebrew-academy.huji.ac.il/deci-
       sion4.html). Users are also encouraged to refer to Hebrew dictionaries which use the niqqud-less spelling  (such  as  Millon  Ha-hove,  Rav
       Milim, and the new Even Shoshan).

       Hspell's  distribution  (and  Web  site)  also  include a document, niqqudless.odt, which explains Hspell's spelling standard in detail (in
       Hebrew). It explains both the overall principles, and why specific words are spelled the way they are.

       Future releases might include an option for alternative spelling standards.

BEHIND THE SCENES

       The hspell program itself is mostly a simple (but efficient) program that checks input words against a long list of valid words.  The  real
       "brains" behind it are the word lists (dictionary) provided by the Hspell project.

       In order for this dictionary to be completely free of other people's copyright restrictions, the Hspell project is a clean-room implementa-
       tion, not based on pre-existing word lists or spell checkers, or on copying of printed dictionaries.

       The word list is also not based on automatic scanning of available Hebrew documents (such as online newspapers), because there is no way to
       guarantee that such a list will be correct (not contain misspellings, useless proper names, and so on), complete (certain inflections might
       not appear in the chosen samples), or consistent (especially when it comes to niqqud-less spelling rules).

       Instead, our idea was to write programs which know how to correctly inflect Hebrew nouns and conjugate Hebrew verbs.  The  input  to  these
       programs  is  a	list of noun stems and verb roots, plus hints needed for the correct inflection when these cannot be figured out automati-
       cally. Most of the effort that went into the Hspell project went into building these input files.  Then, "word list generators" (written in
       Perl,  and  are	also  part  of the Hspell project) create the complete inflected word list that will be used by the spellchecking program,
       hspell.	This generation process is only done once, when building hspell from source.

       These lists, before and after inflection, may be useful for much more than spellchecking. Morphological	analysis  (which  hspell  provides
       with the -l option) is one example. For more ideas, see Hspell project's Web site, at http://ivrix.org.il/projects/spell-checker.

FILES

       ~/.hspell_words, ./hspell_words
	      These files, if they exist, should contain a list of Hebrew words that hspell will also accept as correct words.

	      Note that only these words exactly will be added - they are not inflected, and prefixes are not automatically allowed.

       /usr/local/share/hspell/*
	      The standard Hebrew word lists used by hspell.

EXIT STATUS

       Currently always 0.

VERSION

       The version of hspell described by this manual page is 1.1 (December 31, 2009)

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (C) 2000-2009, Nadav Har'El <nyh@math.technion.ac.il> and Dan Kenigsberg <danken@cs.technion.ac.il>.

       Hspell  is  free  software,  released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).  Note that not only the programs in the distribution, but
       also the dictionary files and the generated word lists, are licensed under the GPL.  There is no warranty of any kind.

       See the LICENSE file for more information and the exact license terms.

       The latest version of this software can be found in http://hspell.ivrix.org.il/

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

       The hspell utility and the linguistic databases behind it  (collectively  called  "the  Hspell  project")  were	created  by  Nadav  Har'El
       <nyh@math.technion.ac.il> and by Dan Kenigsberg <danken@cs.technion.ac.il>.

       Although  we  wrote  all of Hspell's code ourselves, we are truly indebted to the old-style "open source" pioneers - people who wrote books
       instead of hiding their knowledge in proprietary software. For the correct noun inflections, Dr. Shaul Barkali's "The Complete  Noun  Book"
       has  been  a  great  help. Prof. Uzzi Ornan's booklet "Verb Conjugation in Flow Charts" has been instrumental in the implementation of verb
       conjugation, and Barkali's "The Complete Verb Book" was used too.

       During our work we have extensively used a number of Hebrew dictionaries, including Even Shoshan, Millon Ha-hove and Rav-Milim,	to  ensure
       the  correctness  of certain words. Various Hebrew newspapers and books, both printed and online, were used for inspiration and for finding
       words we still do not recognize.

       We wish to thank Cilla Tuviana and Dr. Zvi Har'El for their assistance with some grammatical questions.

       Several other people helped us in various releases, with suggestions, fixes or patches - they are listed in the WHATSNEW file in  the  dis-
       tribution.

SEE ALSO

       hspell(3), spell(1), ispell(1), bidiv(1), iconv(1), recode(1)

BUGS

       This manual page is in English.

       For  GUI-lovers,  hspell's  user interface is an abomination. However, as more and more applications learn to interface with hspell, and as
       Hspell's data becomes available in multi-lingual spellcheckers (such as aspell and  hunspell),  this  will  no  longer  be  an  issue.  See
       http://hspell.ivrix.org.il/ for instructions on how to use Hspell in a variety of applications.

       hspell's  being	limited  to the ISO-8859-8 encoding, and not recognizing UTF-8 or even CP1255 (including niqqud), is almost an anachronism
       today.

Hspell 1.1							 31 December 2009							 hspell(1)