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
