Hspell 0.3 announcement
"Groundhog Day"
The original announcement
Earlier today, in the small town of Punxsutawney, PA, a cute little groundhog woke up and got out of its hole. The first thing it saw was the URL:
http://ivrix.org.il/projects/spell-checker/
In which it knew it could find a new release of the free Hebrew spell-checker, Hspell - release 0.3.
The second thing it saw was its own shadow, which means, according to legend, that we will not have another Hspell release for another six weeks. Well, more-or-less six weeks... It's just a woodchuck after all, and not one of the Hspell developers!
Here's what it found in the new release:
Some incorrect words purged or fixed, and many more words added: over 1,000 base words and 20,000 inflections. In this release, emphasis has been put on adding Hebrew nouns and adjectives.
Fixed Makefile behavior in certain case. In particular "make" should work regardless of LC_* environment variables. However, as hspell currently works on iso8859-8 encoded files, users with a utf8 locale must run the "hspell" perl program as "LC_ALL=C hspell" (otherwise, they will see error messages from Perl).
Added ispell-like "-a" option, for interfacing with LyX. If you want to use hspell under LyX you should use Hebrew-enabled LyX (version 1.1.6fix4 is known to work). Add the following line to your .lyx/lyxrc file:
\spell_command hspell
Notice that this prevents using English ispell/aspell from within LyX. If you know of a better configuration, please tell us. Notice that if a Hebrew misspelled word is found, it is shown reversed on LyX's spellchecker (and so are its corrections). This is about to be corrected in future releases of LyX. Also, LyX breaks Hebrew acronyms wrongly, and causes hspell to reject them.Read http://www.math.tau.ac.il/~dekelts/lyx/instructions2.html for Hebrew LyX general instructions.
No longer incorrectly recognize שלווום (should be שלוום, "that to their hook").
The wolig.pl automatic inflector can handle country names, and many more country names and nationalities have been added. Note that since I did not find a source for "official" country-name spellings in Hebrew, our list might contain errors. Please tell us if you know a dictionary or other authoritative document which contains the official Hebrew spellings of country names.
Vocabulary: 189,347 words based on 5238 nouns, 927 adjectives, 3568 verb stems, and 1203 other words
They say "mishnichnas adar marbim besimcha". We didn't have too many reasons to be happy in the last few days, but I do hope that at least some of you will enjoy a fresh Hspell in the beginning of the new month. At least a little. And if you don't, or find bugs, blame the groundhog (or better yet, tell us.)
-- Nadav Har'El | Sunday, Feb 2 2003, 1 Adar I 5763