Provided by: hspell_1.4-3.1build1_amd64 bug

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 have a more friendly interface for making corrections for  you.  However,  unlike
       spell(1),  hspell  can  suggest  possible  corrections  for  some  spelling  errors.  Such
       suggestions can be 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.,  UTF-8)  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 version  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  finding corrections for incorrect niqqud-less spellings, with
              missing or extra 'immot-qri'a.

       -n     The -n option  will  give  some  longer  "notes"  about  certain  spelling  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 behavior. 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 misspellings and their possible meanings.

       -s     Normally,  the words deemed spelling mistakes are shown in alphabetical 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 possible 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 conveniently 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 similar 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 nevertheless 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 testing Hspell, when  the  dictionaries  have
              been compiled in the current 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, thinking they are
              talking to ispell. These options 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  viewpoint.   It's  an
       advantage  because  it  encourages a correct and consistent spelling style throughout your
       writing. It is a disadvantage, because a few of the Academia's official spelling decisions
       are relatively unknown to the general public.

       Users  of  Hspell  (and  all  Hebrew  writers, for that matter) are encouraged 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/decision4.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).

       Hspell's distribution (and Web  site)  also  include  a  document,  niqqudless.odt,  which
       explains  Hspell's  spelling  standard in detail (in Hebrew). It explains both the overall
       principles, and why specific words are spelled the way they are.

       A future release may include an option for alternative spelling standards.

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 implementation, 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, complete, or consistent in its spelling standard.

       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  inflected word list that will be used by the
       spellchecking program, hspell.  This generation 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 1.4.

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright  (C)  2000-2017,  Nadav  Har'El  <nyh@math.technion.ac.il>  and  Dan  Kenigsberg
       <danken@cs.technion.ac.il>.

       Hspell is free software, released under the  GNU  Affero  General  Public  License  (AGPL)
       version  3.   Note that not only the programs in the distribution, but also the dictionary
       files and the generated word lists, are licensed under the AGPL.  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://hspell.ivrix.org.il/

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.technion.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 correct 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 conjugation, and Barkali's
       "The Complete Verb Book" was used too.

       During our work we have extensively used a number of Hebrew dictionaries,  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 distribution.

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. However, as more and more
       applications learn to interface with hspell, and as Hspell's  data  becomes  available  in
       multi-lingual  spellcheckers  (such  as  aspell  and  hunspell), this will no longer be an
       issue. See http://hspell.ivrix.org.il/ for instructions on how to use Hspell in a  variety
       of applications.

       hspell's  being  limited  to  the  ISO-8859-8  encoding, and not recognizing UTF-8 or even
       CP1255 (including niqqud), is an anachronism today.