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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  sug‐
       gest  possible  corrections for some spelling errors - such suggestions
       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 viewing,
       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  ver‐
	      sion information and exits.

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

       -n     The -n option will give some longer "notes" about certain spell‐
	      ing 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 behav‐
	      ior. 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 mispellings and their possible meanings.

       -s     Normally, the words deemed spelling mistakes are shown in alpha‐
	      betical 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 possi‐
	      ble 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	conve‐
	      niently 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 multispell script supplied with hspell serves a simi‐
	      lar 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 nev‐
	      ertheless 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 test‐
	      ing Hspell, when the dictionaries have been compiled in the cur‐
	      rent 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",  colloquially
       known as "Ktiv Male") published by the Academy of the Hebrew Language.

       This  is	 both an advantage and a disadvantage, depending on your view‐
       point.  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 encour‐
       aged 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).

       Future  releases might include an option for alternative spelling stan‐
       dards.

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  mis‐
       spellings,  useless proper names, and so on), complete (certain inflec‐
       tions 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	automatically.
       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 inlected word
       list that will be used by the spellchecking program, hspell.  This gen‐
       eration 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	1.0  (May  16,
       2006)

COPYRIGHT
       Copyright (C) 2000-2006, 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://www.ivrix.org.il/projects/spell-checker

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.tech‐
       nion.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 cor‐
       rect 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  conjuga‐
       tion, and Barkali's "The Complete Verb Book" was used too.

       During  our work we have extensively used a number of Hebrew dictionar‐
       ies, 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 distri‐
       bution.

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. As more  and
       more  applications  learn to interface with hspell, this will no longer
       be an issue. See http://www.ivrix.org.il/projects/spell-checker/Hspell-
       HOWTO.html for instructions on how to use Hspell in a variety of appli‐
       cations.

       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 1.0			  16 May 2006			     hspell(1)
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