Release 0.8 (June 21, 2004): * Some incorrect words purged or fixed, and many more words added: almost 2,000 base words added. * Reorganized and simplified directory structure of source distribution, and added "autoconf" configuration (use "configure" before "make"). See "configure --help" for a list of build-time options, such as to enable more verb forms and to enable a morphological analyzer for the "-l" option. See the INSTALL file for more instructions. The old Perl "hspell.pl", deprecated in release 0.6, is now gone. * If available, use zlib instead of an external gzip process to read the compressed dictionaries. On our tests, this reduced startup time 2-6 fold. It also allows the Hspell API to be used on systens where pipes or gzip are not available, but zlib is (namely, Windows). * Improved Hspell's C api. There is a new function hspell_uninit() for reclaiming memory allocated by hspell_init(), and all exit() calls were purged from the Library (printouts are still there, unfortunately). NOTE: Because Hspell now uses zlib (see above), when using the libhspell.a library you must now also link with the zlib (-lz) library. This is especially important to remember when looking for libhspell in your own configure scripts. * Fixed a few bugs: in morphological analyzer, handling of files without a newline, and more. * It is now possible to use Hspell's Hebrew word list (and valid prefix information) in the upcoming versions of the Aspell spell-checker. A new build option, "configure --enable-aspell", creates the two files "he.cwl" and "he_affix.dat" which can then be used to build Aspell's Hebrew dictionary. We would like to thank Kevin Atkinson and Kevin Patrick Scannell for their efforts in fixing Aspell's affix support, and making Aspell a viable multi-lingual spell-checker. * Vocabulary: 425,709 words (when including kinuyim on verbs) based on 8935 nouns, 2181 adjectives, 5192 verb stems, and 2289 other words ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Release 0.7 (December 22, 2003): * 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). This 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, and because the collection and sorting of linguistic information makes the compilation takes much longer, 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. An innovative parade of hash symbols now appears on screen to the benefit of the bored builder :) * Vocabulary: 406,629 words (when including kinuyim on verbs) based on 8042 nouns, 1783 adjectives, 5113 verb stems, and 1880 other words ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Release 0.6 (August 5, 2003): 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. * Vocabulary: 394,833 words (when including kinuyim on verbs) based on 7462 nouns, 1533 adjectives, 5060 verb stems, and 1819 other words ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Release 0.5: (May 8, 2003) * Some incorrect words purged or fixed, and many more words added: about 2,000 base words added. * Objective Kinuim are now allowed on all forms of verbs. Because this adds as many as 150,000 correct but rarely-used (in modern texts) inflections, a compile-time option is present for enabling or disabling these forms. The default in this version is *not* to enable them, but this may be changed in the future. Also, precompiled RPMs of both types are available (thanks to Tzafrir Cohen). In order to build the source rpm you must --define in the command-line either 'fat 0' or 'fat 1'. Can anyone tell me how can I set a default for that? * Infinitives now allow בכלמ prefixes, not just ל: לשבור, בשבור, כשבור, משבור. * Added a "-d" option to the word-list generators, which prints derivation explanation for all inflections, and also gender information for all nouns. This feature is not presently used for spell-checking. * Bug fixes: B-words were ignored unless "-v" was used; gimatria checking failed to recognize numbers ending in 17-19; * fixed "ispell -a"'s handling of "^..." lines that prevented Hspell from working properly with KDE (thanks to Meni Livne). * Vocabulary: 390,846 words (when including kinuyim on verbs) based on 7125 nouns, 1484 adjectives, 4801 verb stems, and 1799 other words ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Release 0.4: (March 10, 2003) * Some incorrect words purged or fixed, and many more words added: over 2,300 base words and 60,000 inflections. Thanks to Orna Agmon for reporting some of the missing words. * Complete overhaul of the hspell homepage (http://www.ivrix.org.il/projects/spell-checker/). Also, the site now features signed RPMs, and the spec used to make them is included in the source distribution. The current binary RPM includes the dictionary compressed with a special algorithm, making it, and the final installation, very small (as little as 100K), at the expense of the "-v" option not working. Thanks to Tzafrir Cohen and Oron Peled for the initial version of the spec. * Shem Poal Natuy + Kinuy for all verbs, things like: ותבשב ,יננטצהב There is probably an error in the conjugation of these Shmot Poal from Binyan Qal. woo creates בזוכרנו, while the strict rules say it should be בזכרנו. This would be settled by the next release. * Added "-i" option, to be used in addition to "-a" from within other programs (e.g. LyX) to allow spell-checking of mixed English-Hebrew text by using ispell for the English words. The new program "hspell-i" runs hspell with the -i option, so it can be used in (for example) LyX as the spellchecker. (thanks to Alon Altman) * Long options, and new --help and --version options. (thanks to Tzafrir Cohen) * Vocabulary: 250,027 words based on 6238 nouns, 1174 adjectives, 4584 verb stems, and 1291 other words ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Release 0.3: (February 2, 2003) * 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Release 0.2: (January 5, 2003) * Many more nouns, verbs, and other words: around 2500 new base words, and 40,000 inflections. Emphasis has been given to adding *common* words that will appear in typical, modern, documents. * Several incorrect words purged or fixed. * Wolig.pl (noun inflector) overhaul to better and more consistently handle niqqud-less (ktiv male) spelling rules, and to be able to theoretically handle at least 99.9% of the Hebrew nouns (of course, we don't have all of them in the dictionary, yet :)). * -n option to hspell program, which gives longer (human-written) explanations on certain spelling errors - especially common niqqud-less spelling errors. * Read additional accepted words from ~/.hspell_words and/or ./hspell_words * Kinuim Khavurim (possesive suffixes) are recognized on the infinitive forms of the verb. * Added manual page, hspell(1) * Improved Makefile (thanks to Oron Peled) and made other changes to the distribution (thanks to Baruch Even) for more easily building binary packages of hspell. * Vocabulary: 169,266 words based on 4505 nouns, 645 adjectives, 3407 verb stems, and 1237 other words ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Release 0.1: (first public release - December 13, 2002) * Vocabulary: 125,022 words based on 3206 nouns, 452 adjectives, 2712 verb stems, and 980 other words * In this release we would like to thank Uwe Brauer and Michael Lugassy for "convincing" us to start and to advance this project when we were almost ready to give up. See more acknowledgments in the README file.