hspell(1)

🌸 hspell — Hebrew spellchecker 🌸

okay bestie, sit down, because this is the Hebrew spellchecker and she is iconic. this is the manual for hspell(1) and we're gonna go through it together, no skimming, no skipping. every flag, every file, every vibe. let's go 💅

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

hspell [ -acDhHilnsvV ] [file...]

that's it. that's the whole entry point. look at her. so simple, so powerful 🫶

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so what does hspell actually do? she tries to find incorrectly spelled Hebrew words in her input files. that's the job. that's the mission. 🎀

now, like the traditional Unix spell(1), hspell just prints out the sorted list of incorrect words. she does not have a friendlier interface that fixes things for you. she's not your mom, she's your proofreader who circles stuff in red pen. however — and this is the glow-up — unlike spell(1), hspell can suggest possible corrections for some spelling errors. those suggestions get enabled with the -c (correct) and -n (notes) options. so she circles the mistake and tells you what you probably meant. queen behavior 👑

hspell currently expects ISO-8859-8-encoded input files. non-Hebrew characters in the input files are ignored, which makes it super easy to spellcheck Hebrew-English texts, or HTML files, or TeX files. but listen — if your files use a different encoding (like, say, UTF-8, which is literally everything in the modern era 😭), you have to convert them first to ISO-8859-8. like, see iconv(1), or recode(1). do not skip this step bestie, she will not understand you.

the output will also be in ISO-8859-8 encoding, in so-called "logical order", so normally you'll want to pipe it into bidiv(1) before viewing it, like this:

hspell -c filename | bidiv | less

see? pipe it, prettify it, page through it. chef's kiss 🧚

if no input file is given, hspell reads from its standard input. classic. stdin is always there for you 💜

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

okay this is the main character section, buckle up:

• -v — if you give her -v, hspell prints emacs-oriented version information and then exits. that's it. bye.
• -vv — repeating the -v option (so, -vv) makes hspell also show you some info about which optional features were enabled at compile time. she's giving you the behind-the-scenes tour 🦋
• -V — with -V, hspell prints true and human-oriented version information and exits. capital V for the humans, lowercase v for the emacs girlies. iykyk.
• -c — if you give her -c, hspell will suggest corrections for misspelled words, whenever she can find such corrections. and ngl? the correction mechanism in this release is especially good at finding corrections for incorrect niqqud-less spellings, with missing or extra 'immot-qri'a. she ate that.
• -n — the -n option gives you some longer "notes" about certain spelling errors, explaining why these are indeed errors (or, in what cases using this word is in fact correct). and it is recommended to combine the two options — -cn — for maximal correction help from hspell. bestie combo, fr fr.
• -l — the -l (linguistic information) option will explain, for each correct word, why it was recognized. she shows the basic noun, verb, etc., that this inflection relates to, plus its tense, gender, associated Kinnuy, or other relevant information. it's giving linguistics degree ✨

if Hspell was built without morphological analysis support, this option will only show the correct splits of the given word into prefix + word — because the full information incurs a 4-fold increase in the installation size. that's a big girl install.

and listen, giving -c in addition to -l results in special behavior. in that case hspell suggests "corrections" to every word (regardless of whether they're 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. lowkey genius for app devs 🫶

• -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 get shown first. this option is most useful for the people helping to build hspell's word list, who are looking for common correct words that hspell doesn't know yet. bless them, they're doing the lord's work 🙏
• -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. she's flexible like that 💅
• -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 (like English words), those are simply ignored. adding -i tells hspell to pass the non-Hebrew words to ispell(1), and return its answer as an answer from hspell. so now you can conveniently spell-check mixed Hebrew-English documents. bilingual icon 🌈

and plot twist: 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. sneaky, clever, obsessed.

• -H — by default, Hspell does not allow the He Ha-sh'ela prefix. why? because this prefix is not normally used in modern Hebrew, and it 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. you've been warned, she's not responsible for the chaos 💀
• -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". dev mode activated 🔥
• -d, -B, -m, -T, -C, -S, -P, -p, -w, and -W — these options are passed to hspell by lyx or other applications, thinking they're talking to ispell. these options are cordially ignored. no cap, she just smiles and nods. 🎀

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👑 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. strict queen. no shortcuts.

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. consistency slays 💅
• it's a disadvantage because a few of the Academia's official spelling decisions are relatively unknown to the general public. so sometimes she'll correct you and you'll be like "???" and she'll be like "trust me bestie, it's official" 😭

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). go read, it's good for you 📚

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. so if you ever wondered "why is it spelled like that", the answer is in there 🦋

and a future release may include an option for alternative spelling standards. ooh, she's evolving. keep an eye out 👀

🐛 BUGS (the tea ☕)

Okay bestie, real talk, we gotta be honest about a couple things 💅

• Not me having to say this, but... this manual page is in English. That's it. That's the whole bug report. 💀
• For all my GUI-lovers out there — hspell's user interface is an abomination. Like, it's giving terminal cryptid, no cap 😭. BUT here's the good news: 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 🫶✨. Head over to http://hspell.ivrix.org.il/ for instructions on how to use Hspell in a variety of applications. Slay 💖
• And the big one: hspell's being limited to the ISO-8859-8 encoding, and not recognizing UTF-8 or even CP1255 (including niqqud), is an anachronism today 🙈. It's giving 1998, fr fr. Lowkey iconic, highkey outdated. 👑

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So yeah, that's the vibe check — she's a legend, she's just a little ✨ vintage ✨ in the encoding department. 🌸

Anyway bestie, that's a wrap on hspell(1)! 💖 This page came to you from Hspell 1.4, dated 24 June 2017 — take care of her, she's doing her best 🎀🦋⭐