Other Jewish/Hebrew Open Source Projects

[Aharon Varady]

Every now and again I do a search to see what other open source projects are out there that aspire to provide some benefit to Jewish practice.
Here's what I found searching freshmeat.net and sourceforge with the keywords "Jewish" or "Hebrew."

Please comment if you've used any of these and think they might provide a useful feature for the Open Siddur.


http://freshmeat.net/projects/hare
HaRe is a recognition engine for Hebrew handwriting. I wonder how it might perform with irregular typography. Probably really badly, but I'd like to know.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/hspell
Hspell is a Hebrew linguistic project. It features a Hebrew spell-checker, and aims to use the databases and algorithms developed as a morphology engine (for example, for search engines)

http://freshmeat.net/projects/pecl_enchant
The Enchant extension aims to provide a full featured Enchant binder for PHP. The Enchant library provides a common API to work with many spelling tools.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/aconcorde
aConCorde is a concordance tool to help visualise how words behave in relation to others. It is useful for linguists to study languages, and for people learning foreign languages to learn new words in an example-based approach.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/zmanim
Zmanim is a software package that computes zmanim, the times (according to Jewish law) by which an observant Jew must complete specific prayers.

http://culmus.sourceforge.net/
Hebrew Open Source Fonts

http://qabalist.sourceforge.net/
Transliteration, notarikon, gematriah, etc.

http://cantillizer.sourceforge.net/
Cantillation analysis

http://www.ezer.dk/EzerKb/
Virtual Keyboard

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mekorot/
Attempts to create a free version of the Hebrew 'Talmud', as PDF files, while keeping the original page's shape (known as 'Tzurat Hadaf') .

http://sourceforge.net/projects/typefaster/files/
Typing tutor for Hebrew

-----------------------------


http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=jewish
http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=hebrew

http://freshmeat.net/search?q=hebrew&submit=Search
http://freshmeat.net/search?q=jewish&submit=Search

[Ze'ev Clementson]

Hi Aharon,

Great list of projects!

I already knew about the "Hebrew Open Source Fonts" project (I
especially like the paleo-Hebew fonts). If you have a look at the
project, you might also be interested in looking at the "History of
the Hebrew Alphabet" presentation (in Hebrew with a cool set of
illustrations) on one of the project pages:
http://culmus.sourceforge.net/ancient/HscriptPresent/Hebrew-Script.html

The other projects are all new ones that I hadn't seen before and
which I'll need to look at.

Thanks,
Ze'ev

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[Efraim Feinstein]

Aharon Varady wrote:
> Every now and again I do a search to see what other open source
> projects are out there that aspire to provide some benefit to Jewish
> practice.

> Here's what I found searching freshmeat.net <http://freshmeat.net> and

> sourceforge with the keywords "Jewish" or "Hebrew."

Try the same search on Google Code also?

>
> http://freshmeat.net/projects/hare
> HaRe is a recognition engine for Hebrew handwriting. I wonder how it
> might perform with irregular typography. Probably really badly, but
> I'd like to know.

I tried to download this one, but had some issues. I wouldn't put too
much faith in it. It was last updated in 2006, and most handwriting
does not have nikud.

> http://freshmeat.net/projects/hspell
> Hspell is a Hebrew linguistic project. It features a Hebrew
> spell-checker, and aims to use the databases and algorithms developed
> as a morphology engine (for example, for search engines)

The last time I looked at hspell, it didn't support nikud and used
Academy-spelling, which is not particularly useful for checking
liturgical texts. I'm not sure if any of that has changed.

> http://freshmeat.net/projects/zmanim
> Zmanim is a software package that computes zmanim, the times
> (according to Jewish law) by which an observant Jew must complete
> specific prayers.

zmanim-type support software may be useful if we ever have a real-time
compiled version of the software for PCs or PDAs. Compare to
http://code.google.com/p/asiddur/

> http://culmus.sourceforge.net/
> Hebrew Open Source Fonts

I worked with an older version of the Culmus fonts. Their project
looked dead for a while, then got revived. It's definitely worth
another look. Even if it doesn't work for trope, it sounds like they're
doing OpenType vowel placement, and they may be useful as alternate
fonts for nonbiblical text.

Problem: the fonts are GPL-ed. Unless they have an exception, it will
make embedding them in distributed non-GPL documents prohibitive.

> http://qabalist.sourceforge.net/
> Transliteration, notarikon, gematriah, etc.
>
> http://cantillizer.sourceforge.net/
> Cantillation analysis

Not sure about these.

>
> http://www.ezer.dk/EzerKb/
> Virtual Keyboard

Not particularly useful.

>
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/mekorot/
> Attempts to create a free version of the Hebrew 'Talmud', as PDF
> files, while keeping the original page's shape (known as 'Tzurat Hadaf') .

This looks very interesting, particularly the PDF creation aspect. I
think he's using ReportLab as his PDF generator.

>
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/typefaster/files/
> Typing tutor for Hebrew

Personally, I'd suggest transcribing Seder Avodat Yisrael. It will make
you a much faster Hebrew typist. :-)

--
---
Efraim Feinstein
Lead Developer
Open Siddur Project
http://opensiddur.net
http://wiki.jewishliturgy.org

[Aharon Varady]

Just stumbled over this GPL project, http://www.kosherjava.com/zmanim-project/ which could be useful for some folk on this list.

Aharon