Announce: Hspell 1.3

[Nadav Har'El]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015, E.S. Rosenberg wrote about "Re: Announce: Hspell 1.3":
> Thanks for your great work!
> 
> While we're on the topic of writing Hebrew on OSS (and even non-oss),
> I have always wondered how people type with niqqud and never succeeded
> in finding a nice guide (for linux/libreoffice)...

First, you need to make sure you use a font which has niqqud. Many of
the excellent Culmus fonts do support niqqud, so hopefully you're
using one that supports niqqud (if not, switch).

Second, you need a keyboard mapping which allows you to type niqqud.
The single-handedly best for that is the so-called "he-lyx" mapping.
How to enable it depends on your "desktop environment", but in my own
no-frills environment I actually set the keyboard mapping directly
with the command:

setxkbmap -option grp:switch,grp:shift_toggle,grp_led:scroll us,il ,lyx

At that point, when you're in Hebrew mode (with the above command's
"shift_toggle", switching to Hebrew involves pressing the two shifts),
if you press shift and one of the hebrew letters, you get one of the
niqqud. Most of them have easy to remember mnemonics - e.g., to get a
kamats on the previous letter, type shift-quf (in other words, "E").
You can experiment to find all the other niqqudim. Shift-minus also
gives you a maqqaf (higher than the hyphen) - don't forget to use it ;-)

Finally, you'll need to learn the rules of correct niqqud ;-) There's
nothing worse than making an effort to add niqqud - but then using
the wrong niqqud. This is a completely separate topic. Maybe one day,
when my kids grow up, I'll write a spell-checker / helper for niqqud...
It's not *that* hard.

Good luck!

BTW, if you look in my document, you can see in addition to niqqud, it
also contains words in Russian, Arabic, Greek, Turkish not to mention
the latin alphabet. The beauty of unicode, and cut-and-paste from the
Internet :-)

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |      Wednesday, Feb 25 2015, 6 Adar 5775
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Classical music: music written by a
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |decomposing composer.