Hspell 0.7 announcement
"Cold Evening"
The original announcement
Releasing Words On A Cold Evening
Whose words these are we truly know.
They are ours - let us share them all.
We would not agree to be stopping here
To watch our words fill up with faults.
Our little spellchecker must think it's clear
To be released with such a milestone here
Between the words and linguistic terms
The darkest evening of the year.
It gives its stdout a shake
To warn when there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and working disks.
The words are lovely, fresh and free.
But we have promises to keep,
And words to hunt before we sleep,
And words to hunt before we sleep.
On this shortest day, we announce a new version of Hspell - the free Hebrew spell-checker.
As usual, you can find the new release in the project's homepage, at:
This release includes the following improvements:
- Some incorrect words purged or fixed, and many more words added: over 1,000 base words added.
- Portability improvements (thanks to Baruch Even).
- New run-time option -H causes hspell to accept He Ha-she'ela in the text.
- The "-n" option (for spelling hints, an explanation of certain kinds of errors) that was lost in version 0.6, is now back. The "likelyerrors" feature is still missing in this version.
- A new, and somewhat tentative, Documented C API (libhspell.a library, spell.h header, hspell.3 manual). These are not available in the normal RPM - compile the sources yourself if you want them.
- A full morphological analyzer (explaining all the possible ways to read a given word, how each reading was derived and its syntactic properties) is now available when Hspell is run with the "-l" option. Because the data files needed for this feature currently take up as much as 4 times the space needed only for spell-checking, this feature is not compiled by default, unless compilation is done with "make linginfo". Also, the normal RPM does not include this feature, but the "fat" RPM does include it.
Hspell's Vocabulary is now 406,629 words (when including kinuyim on verbs) based on 8042 nouns, 1783 adjectives, 5113 verb stems, and 1880 other words.
In recent months, Hspell has been increasingly used with various free-software applications. We would like to thank Mitz Pettel, Meni Livne, Yaacov Zamir, Mooffie and Alan Yaniger for their integration work and their suggestions. You might want to check out:
- http://www.ivrix.org.il/projects/spell-checker/Hspell-HOWTO.html describes how to use Hspell with LyX, KDE, Vim, Emacs and Geresh.
- http://www.ivrix.org.il/projects/spell-checker/docs.html Includes screenshots of Hspell being used with KMail, Geresh, Emacs, Vim, Abiword, Openoffice and Mellel (a commercial Mac OS-X word processor).
Share and enjoy,
Nadav Har'El and Dan Kenigsberg.