Hebcal 3.1 - a program for printing Jewish calendars by Danny Sadinoff DESCRIPTION Hebcal is a program which prints out the days in the Jewish calendar for a given gregorian year. Hebcal is fairly flexible in terms of which events in the Jewish calendar it displays. Each of the following can be individualy turned on or off: The Hebrew date Jewish Holdiays (including Yom Ha'atzmaut and Yom HaShoah etc.) The weekly Sedrah The day of the week The days of the Omer CHANGES since version 3.0b - Shabbat starts 40 minutes before sundown in Jerusalem. - Added a -m option to set when havdalah takes place. It defaults to 72 minutes after sundown. - The environment variables that hebcal reads are no longer configurable at compilation time. That was a needless piece of complexity. CHANGES since version 2.1 The changes to hebcal since version 2.1 are too numerous to mention here; see the file CHANGES in the distribution. A brief overview follows: - The biggest change is the addition of candlelighting times. - All of the algorithms have been speeded up. - Numerous errors, especially Yahrtzeit handling, have been corrected. - Hebcal can now print Hebrew date ranges, something I've wanted since version 1. You can now query hebcal with hebcal Nisan 5754 to get the holidays of Nisan 5754. TODO: I'm porting hebcal to perl5, which will solve, once and for all, everyone's porting headaches. INSTALLATION Since you're reading this, you have already successfully unpacked the source files. The next step is to customize the program for your city. If you live in the New York area, you can go ahead and run "make". Otherwise, take a look at the Makefile. There is a list of names of the cities that hebcal is coded to understand. IF your city is on the list, simply change the NEW_YORK in CITY = NEW_YORK to your city name. If your city is NOT on the list, then in order to customize hebcal to your city, you will need to pass it the lattitude, longitude, timezone and daylight savings code (see the manual). Suppose you live in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Your lattitude is 44d1'29", and your longitude is 88d32'33". You are in timezone Z-6, with the daylight savings scheme normal to the US. We'll round the geographic coordinates to the nearest minute. In order to get candlelighting times for the current year, you would type hebcal -ch -l44,1 -L 88,33 -z-6 -Zusa Now this can get rough on the fingers if you do it a lot, so the HEBCAL_OPTS environment variable is available for you to use. Every time hebcal is run, it checks this variable. If it is non-empty, the arguments in that variable are read as though they were typed at the command line before the ones you actually type. So you might set HEBCAL_OPTS to be -l44,1 -L 88,33 -z-6 -Zusa and if you type hebcal -ch hebcal will think you typed hebcal -l44,1 -L 88,33 -z-6 -Zusa -ch REMEMBER: negative longitudes are EAST of Greenwich. For information on setting environment variables, consult your local guru. The names "HEBCAL_OPTS" and "CITY" can be changed in the makefile, where they are the values of the variables ENV_OPTS and ENV_CITY, respectively. To sum up, on the first installation, adjust the CITY makefile variable according to where you are. Once an install is complete, there are three ways to change cities, or pick a city not on the list: 1) change the CITY environment variable 2) change the HEBCAL_OPTS variable to reflect the new city's coordinates. 3) pass a -C city argument to hebcal. You can check where hebcal thinks it is by typing hebcal info at the command line. ----------- The file hebcal.1 is the manual page, and is created when you compile the program. For information on using man in conjunction with local manpages, see the manpage for man. If you want to see what the manpage would look like, type make MANUAL at the command line, and the shell will deposit a text version of the manpage in the file MANUAL. DISTRIBUTION Hebcal is distributed under the GNU Public License. The program and its source code may be freely distributed. For details, see the file COPYING in the distribution. If you are going to use this program, please drop me a line. I'd like to know who you are, what version you're using, and how you're using hebcal, and anything else you'd like to tell me, so that I can adjust the program to meet users' needs. I am NOT demanding payment for the use of my program, but writing this program DID take time. The "free" in the GNU public license refers to distribution, not necessarily payment. Feel free to send $10 or multiples of $18 or just a postcard to me at my US Mail address. send US Mail to: send email to: Danny Sadinoff sadinoff@pobox.com 1 Cove La. Great Neck, NY 11024 Email respondents will receive notifications of new versions as they come out, as will US Mail responents (if they send me postage for a disk). The latest version of the code will be available from http://pobox.com/~sadinoff/hebcal