1hspell(1)                            Ivrix                           hspell(1)
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3
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NAME

6       hspell - Hebrew spellchecker
7

SYNOPSIS

9       hspell [ -acDhHilnsvV ] [file...]
10

DESCRIPTION

12       hspell  tries  to  find  incorrectly  spelled Hebrew words in its input
13       files.
14
15       Like the traditional Unix spell(1), hspell outputs the sorted  list  of
16       incorrect words, and does not have a more friendly interface for making
17       corrections for you. However, unlike spell(1), hspell can suggest  pos‐
18       sible  corrections  for  some  spelling errors. Such suggestions can be
19       enabled with the -c (correct) and -n (notes) options.
20
21       Hspell currently expects  ISO-8859-8-encoded  input  files.  Non-Hebrew
22       characters   in   the  input  files  are  ignored,  allowing  the  easy
23       spellchecking of Hebrew-English texts, as well as HTML  or  TeX  files.
24       If  files  using  a different encoding (e.g., UTF-8) are to be checked,
25       they must  be  converted  first  to  ISO-8859-8  (e.g.,  see  iconv(1),
26       recode(1)).
27
28       The  output  will also be in ISO-8859-8 encoding, in so-called "logical
29       order", so it is normally useful to pipe it to bidiv(1) before viewing,
30       as in:
31
32              hspell -c filename | bidiv | less
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34       If no input file is given, hspell reads from its standard input.
35

OPTIONS

37       -v     If  the -v option is given, hspell prints emacs-oriented version
38              information and exits.
39
40       -vv    Repetition of the -v option causes  hspell  to  also  show  some
41              information  on  which optional features were enabled at compile
42              time.
43
44       -V     With the -V option, hspell prints true and  human-oriented  ver‐
45              sion information and exits.
46
47       -c     If  the  -c option is given, hspell will suggest corrections for
48              misspelled words, whenever it can  find  such  corrections.  The
49              correction mechanism in this release is especially good at find‐
50              ing corrections for incorrect niqqud-less spellings, with  miss‐
51              ing or extra 'immot-qri'a.
52
53       -n     The -n option will give some longer "notes" about certain spell‐
54              ing errors, explaining why these are indeed errors (or  in  what
55              cases  using  this  word is in fact correct). It is recommend to
56              combine the two options, -cn for maximal  correction  help  from
57              hspell.
58
59       -l     The  -l  (linguistic  information)  option will explain for each
60              correct word why it was recognized (show the basic  noun,  verb,
61              etc.,  that  this  inflection relates to, and its tense, gender,
62              associated Kinnuy, or other relevant information)
63
64              If Hspell was built without morphological analysis support, this
65              option  will only show the correct splits of the given word into
66              prefix + word, as the full information incurs a 4-fold  increase
67              in the installation size.
68
69              Giving the -c option in addition to -l results in special behav‐
70              ior. In that case hspell suggests "corrections"  to  every  word
71              (regardless if they are in the dictionary or not), and shows the
72              linguistic information on all those words. This  can  be  useful
73              for  a  reader  application,  which  may also want to be able to
74              understand misspellings and their possible meanings.
75
76
77       -s     Normally, the words deemed spelling mistakes are shown in alpha‐
78              betical order.  The -s option orders them by severity, i.e., the
79              errors that most frequently appear in  the  document  are  shown
80              first.   This  option is most useful for people helping to build
81              hspell's word list, and are looking  for  common  correct  words
82              that hspell does not know yet.
83
84       -a     With the -a option, hspell tries to emulate (as little as possi‐
85              ble of) ispell's pipe interface. This allows Lyx, Emacs,  Geresh
86              and KDE to use hspell as an external spell-checker.
87
88       -i     This  option  only has any effect when used together with the -a
89              option. Normally, hspell -a only checks the spelling  of  Hebrew
90              words. If the given file also contains non-Hebrew words (such as
91              English words), these are simply ignored. Adding the  -i  option
92              tells  hspell  to  pass  the  non-Hebrew words to ispell(1), and
93              return its answer as an answer from hspell.  This allows  conve‐
94              niently spell-checking mixed Hebrew-English documents.
95
96              Running  hspell  with the program name hspell-i also enables the
97              -i option. This is a useful trick when  an  application  expects
98              just  the  name  of  a spell-checking program, and adds only the
99              "-a" option (without giving the  user  an  option  to  also  add
100              "-i"). The multispell script supplied with hspell serves a simi‐
101              lar purpose, with more control over encodings and  which  spell-
102              checker to run for non-Hebrew words.
103
104       -H     By  default, Hspell does not allow the He Ha-sh'ela prefix. This
105              is because this prefix is not normally used  in  modern  Hebrew,
106              and  generates many false-negatives (errors, like He followed by
107              a possessed noun, are thought to be correct). The -H option nev‐
108              ertheless tells Hspell to allow this prefix.
109
110       -D base
111              Load  the  word  lists from the given base pathname, rather than
112              from the compiled-in default path. This is mostly used for test‐
113              ing Hspell, when the dictionaries have been compiled in the cur‐
114              rent directory and hspell is run as "hspell -Dhebrew.wgz".
115
116       -d, -B, -m, -T, -C, -S, -P, -p, -w, and -W
117              These options are passed to hspell by lyx or other applications,
118              thinking they are talking to ispell. These options are cordially
119              ignored.
120

SPELLING STANDARD

122       Hspell was designed to be 100% and strictly compliant with the official
123       niqqud-less  spelling  rules  ("Ha-ktiv Khasar Ha-niqqud", colloquially
124       known as "Ktiv Male") published by the Academy of the Hebrew Language.
125
126       This is both an advantage and a disadvantage, depending on  your  view‐
127       point.   It's  an advantage because it encourages a correct and consis‐
128       tent spelling style throughout your  writing.  It  is  a  disadvantage,
129       because  a  few of the Academia's official spelling decisions are rela‐
130       tively unknown to the general public.
131
132       Users of Hspell (and all Hebrew writers, for that matter)  are  encour‐
133       aged  to read the Academia's official niqqud-less spelling rules (which
134       are printed at the end of  most  modern  Hebrew  dictionaries,  and  an
135       abridged version is available in http://hebrew-academy.huji.ac.il/deci
136       sion4.html). Users are also encouraged to refer to Hebrew  dictionaries
137       which  use the niqqud-less spelling (such as Millon Ha-hove, Rav Milim,
138       and the new Even Shoshan).
139
140       Hspell's distribution (and Web site) also include a  document,  niqqud‐
141       less.odt,  which  explains  Hspell's  spelling  standard  in detail (in
142       Hebrew). It explains both the  overall  principles,  and  why  specific
143       words are spelled the way they are.
144
145       A  future  release may include an option for alternative spelling stan‐
146       dards.
147

BEHIND THE SCENES

149       The hspell program itself is mostly a simple  (but  efficient)  program
150       that  checks  input  words against a long list of valid words. The real
151       "brains" behind it are the word  lists  (dictionary)  provided  by  the
152       Hspell project.
153
154       In  order  for  this dictionary to be completely free of other people's
155       copyright restrictions, the Hspell project is a clean-room  implementa‐
156       tion,  not  based  on  pre-existing word lists or spell checkers, or on
157       copying of printed dictionaries.
158
159       The word list is also not based  on  automatic  scanning  of  available
160       Hebrew  documents  (such as online newspapers), because there is no way
161       to guarantee that such a list will be correct, complete, or  consistent
162       in its spelling standard.
163
164       Instead,  our  idea  was  to write programs which know how to correctly
165       inflect Hebrew nouns and conjugate Hebrew verbs.  The  input  to  these
166       programs  is a list of noun stems and verb roots, plus hints needed for
167       the correct inflection when these cannot be figured out  automatically.
168       Most of the effort that went into the Hspell project went into building
169       these input files.  Then, "word list generators" (written in Perl,  and
170       are also part of the Hspell project) create the complete inflected word
171       list that will be used by the spellchecking program, hspell.  This gen‐
172       eration process is only done once, when building hspell from source.
173
174       These  lists,  before and after inflection, may be useful for much more
175       than spellchecking. Morphological analysis (which hspell provides  with
176       the -l option) is one example. For more ideas, see Hspell project's Web
177       site, at http://ivrix.org.il/projects/spell-checker.
178

FILES

180       ~/.hspell_words, ./hspell_words
181              These files, if they exist, should  contain  a  list  of  Hebrew
182              words that hspell will also accept as correct words.
183
184              Note  that only these words exactly will be added - they are not
185              inflected, and prefixes are not automatically allowed.
186
187
188       /usr/local/share/hspell/*
189              The standard Hebrew word lists used by hspell.
190
191

EXIT STATUS

193       Currently always 0.
194

VERSION

196       The version of hspell described by this manual page is 1.4.
197
199       Copyright (C) 2000-2017, Nadav Har'El <nyh@math.technion.ac.il> and Dan
200       Kenigsberg <danken@cs.technion.ac.il>.
201
202       Hspell  is  free software, released under the GNU Affero General Public
203       License (AGPL) version 3.  Note that not only the programs in the  dis‐
204       tribution,  but also the dictionary files and the generated word lists,
205       are licensed under the AGPL.  There is no warranty of any kind.
206
207       See the LICENSE file for more information and the exact license terms.
208
209       The   latest   version   of   this   software   can   be    found    in
210       http://hspell.ivrix.org.il/
211

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

213       The hspell utility and the linguistic databases behind it (collectively
214       called  "the  Hspell   project")   were   created   by   Nadav   Har'El
215       <nyh@math.technion.ac.il>   and   by  Dan  Kenigsberg  <danken@cs.tech‐
216       nion.ac.il>.
217
218       Although we wrote all of Hspell's code ourselves, we are truly indebted
219       to  the  old-style  "open  source"  pioneers  -  people who wrote books
220       instead of hiding their knowledge in proprietary software. For the cor‐
221       rect noun inflections, Dr. Shaul Barkali's "The Complete Noun Book" has
222       been a great help. Prof. Uzzi Ornan's booklet "Verb Conjugation in Flow
223       Charts"  has  been  instrumental in the implementation of verb conjuga‐
224       tion, and Barkali's "The Complete Verb Book" was used too.
225
226       During our work we have extensively used a number of Hebrew  dictionar‐
227       ies,  including  Even  Shoshan, Millon Ha-hove and Rav-Milim, to ensure
228       the correctness of certain words. Various Hebrew newspapers and  books,
229       both  printed  and  online,  were  used for inspiration and for finding
230       words we still do not recognize.
231
232       We wish to thank Cilla Tuviana and Dr. Zvi Har'El for their  assistance
233       with some grammatical questions.
234
235       Several  other  people helped us in various releases, with suggestions,
236       fixes or patches - they are listed in the WHATSNEW file in the  distri‐
237       bution.
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239

SEE ALSO

241       hspell(3), spell(1), ispell(1), bidiv(1), iconv(1), recode(1)
242

BUGS

244       This manual page is in English.
245
246       For  GUI-lovers, hspell's user interface is an abomination. However, as
247       more and more applications learn  to  interface  with  hspell,  and  as
248       Hspell's data becomes available in multi-lingual spellcheckers (such as
249       aspell  and  hunspell),  this  will  no  longer  be   an   issue.   See
250       http://hspell.ivrix.org.il/  for instructions on how to use Hspell in a
251       variety of applications.
252
253       hspell's being limited to the ISO-8859-8 encoding, and not  recognizing
254       UTF-8 or even CP1255 (including niqqud), is an anachronism today.
255
256
257
258Hspell 1.4                       24 June 2017                        hspell(1)
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