Hspell 1.1 announcement
"Year's End"

The original announcement

We are proud to present version 1.1 of Hspell, the free Hebrew spell-checker and morphological analyzer.

You can find the new release in the project's homepage:
     http://hspell.ivrix.org.il/

Over three years have passed since our previous release. In that time, we continued to improve Hspell's vocabulary, and enlarged it by 900 more base words. Hspell is now closer to full coverage of the modern Hebrew language than it ever was.

We've always been proud of Hspell's accuracy and its compliance with the spelling standard set by the Academy of the Hebrew Language. Nevertheless, we continuously get asked why Hspell spells certain words the way that it does. So, starting with this release, Hspell now includes a document which describes its spelling standard and discusses the numerous spelling questions which we had to answer while developing hspell. This document is still a work in progress, but even at its present form is already quite readable and, we hope, educational. It is available in Hspell's tarball, and also online:
     http://hspell.ivrix.org.il/niqqudless.pdf

Not only people who download Hspell from our site will benefit from this release. For several years now, only a minority of Hspell's users downloaded it from our site. Hspell has become the de-facto standard Hebrew spell-checker in the free software world and beyond; It is available in Linux distributions, in Aspell's and Hunspell's dictionary collections, and as OpenOffice and Firefox plugins. Even Google's hugely popular mail service, GMail, uses Hspell as its Hebrew spell-checker. We expect that the new Hspell release will soon propagate to all these applications, so that their users will also be able to enjoy the improved vocabulary of Hspell 1.1.

Enjoy Hspell 1.1. No further releases are expected this year ;-)

Nadav Har'El and Dan Kenigsberg.

December 31, 2009