The Hebrew Spelling Service adds a Hebrew spelling dictionary to Mac OS X’s built-in spell checker.
Once the Hebrew Spelling Service is installed, the Hebrew spelling dictionary can be selected and used in any application that has a standard Spelling submenu in its Edit menu, such as TextEdit, Mail or Mellel.
System Requirements
Mac OS X 10.2 or later
The Hebrew Spelling Service is a Universal application.
Features
- Seamlessly integrated with Mac OS X’s built-in spell checker.
- Strictly compliant with the niqqud-less spelling rules published by the Academy of the Hebrew Language.
- Recognizes acronyms and gimatria.
- Features Hspell's vocabulary, which contains 455,043 words (when including kinuyim on verbs) based on 11,724 nouns, 3,297 adjectives, 5,223 verb stems, and 2,345 other words.
Download and Installation
Hebrew Spelling Service (416 KB disk image including Read Me files in English and in Hebrew)
To install, copy Hebrew Spelling.service from the disk image into the Services folder inside the Library folder — either the main Library folder on your hard disk or the Library folder inside your Home folder. If you copy into your Home Library folder, the Hebrew Spelling Service will be available only to you. If you copy into the main Library folder, the service will be available to all users of the computer. You must be have administrator privileges in order to copy items into the main Library folder. If a Services folder does not exist inside the Library folder, simply create one.
The Hebrew Spelling Service is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Source Code
The Hebrew Spelling Service can be built with Xcode 2.3.
What's new in this version
- Version 1.5.1 fixes a bug that caused TextMate to freeze.
- Version 1.5 is powered by version 1.0 of Hspell, which adds 9,962 words to the vocabulary. It is released as a Universal application.
- Version 1.4 adds support for the word completion feature (Edit > Complete in TextEdit) and improves memory performance.
- Version 1.3.1 fixes an incompatibility with Mac OS X 10.4.
- Version 1.3 is powered by version 0.9 of Hspell, which adds 19,372 words to the vocabulary.
Known issues
- Except in Mellel and in Nisus Writer Express, the Check Spelling As You Type option is useless in Hebrew (the spelling underlines either do not appear or appear in the wrong place).
- Words with niqqud are always considered misspelled.
- The Hebrew dictionary does not become part of the Multilingual dictionary, therefore a bilingual document needs to be checked twice, once in Hebrew and once in the other language.
- When switching between the Hebrew Spelling Service and another spelling service, sometimes one of the services stops working (no longer recognizes mistakes). This problem can be solved by quitting the service that still works, using the Process Viewer utility (in Mac OS X v10.2) or the Activity Monitor utility (in Mac OS X v10.3). The name of the process that has to be quit is AppleSpell (for Mac OS X’s built-in spelling service).
If you want to help improve the Service
You can help improving the Hebrew Spelling Service by improving Hspell. To do so, you can send verified lists of missing words to the authors of Hspell. To make sure your list is useful, please try to:
- Check in your favorite dictionary that the word is indeed spelled correctly.
- Check that the spelling you proposed is correct according to the niqqud-less spelling rules published by the Academy of the Hebrew Language.
- Check in the online Hspell interface that the word in question hasn’t been added since the last released version (the online interface is updated more often than versions are released).
The address for sending such verified word lists is nyh@math.technion.ac.il.
Acknowledgments
The Hebrew Spelling Service is merely a front end to Hspell. Hspell was written by Nadav Har’El and Dan Kenigsberg.
Thanks to Nir Soffer contributing code and for his advice on improving the Service.
