Hspell 0.6 announcement
"The Revolution"
The original announcement
You say you want a revolution,
We all want to change the world.
You tell me that it's evolution,
We all want to change the world!
You say you've got a real solution,
We'd all love to see the plan.
You ask me for a contribution,
We are doing what we can.
Don't you know it's gonna be Alright?
After a three months of unrest, the Hspell 0.6 revolution has begun!
The two revolutionaries Nadav Har'El and Dan Kenigsberg created a website describing the New Word Order:
Vive la revolution!
Still wondering what Hspell 0.6 is all about?
In this release, the Hspell front-end (the hspell program) was rewritten. The new front-end has many improvements over the old one, but also a few setbacks - features that are (temporarily) unavailable because they weren't yet ported to the new version.
The improvements:
A huge performance improvement - hspell now starts up, and runs, at least 20 times faster than it used to and takes less than one fifth the memory.
The new front-end is written in C, so Hspell can now run on systems which do not have Perl. Perl is still needed for building Hspell from source.
The list of allowed prefixes was improved (joined work with Shlomo Yona) and hspell now finally knows which prefixes are valid for most words, reducing the risk of accepting misspellings as correct and reducing the number of silly (and wrong) correction suggestions.
Note that unlike earlier versions, words listed in the user's personal dictionary (~/.hspell_words or ./hspell_words) are no longer automatically accepted with prefixes. Also, these words are never used as suggested corrections.
"hspell -a" was made more compatible with the standard "ispell -a" (thanks to Mooffie). Hspell is now known to be used with LyX, KDE, Geresh and Emacs.
The setbacks:
The "-v" option, that used to explain how valid words were derived, is no longer available in this version. It is replaced by a "-l" option, which in this release is weaker (it can only show a division of valid words into prefix particle + word).
The "-n" option, that used to give hints on how to spell correctly, is not available.
The "likelyerrors" feature (or recognizing certain words as theoretically correct but still very likely to be mistakes) is not available.
TeX-like repeated single quote ('') is not treated as double quotes (").
Long options (GNU's "minus-minus" options) are not supported in this version.
Some other changes:
Included in the distribution is a new utility "multispell" by Mooffie, which can spell-check mixed Hebrew-English text by interfacing with two spell-checkers (hspell and ispell) simultaneously. Multispell is better than hspell's built-in slave mode (hspell -a -i) when the calling program can't deal with wrong word order in the results (e.g., Emacs has this issue.)
Some incorrect words purged or fixed, and more words added: over 600 base words added.