2 Aug 89 JUDAIC STUDIES #19 1 Av 49 BS"D Connecting geographically & otherwise disparate groups with a common interest in the study of Judaica. Edited by Y. Greenbaum CONTENTS 1) Public Domain Tanach (a request, not an offer!) 2) WordPerfect 5.0, Turbo-fonts, NB, MLS 1) Indeed, why has nobody asked until now? From: Yoseph Cotton Date: Tue, 01 Aug 89 12:45:26 EDT RABOTAI: Does anyone have or know of an IBM-PC Hebrew word processor? How can I get a copy here in Baltimore? Also, who has Torah or Tanach on diskette? Yechiel points out: What a straight-forward, innocuous question! Part of the wordprocessing matter is discussed below. Considering everything else available publicly, how 'bout one of the original best-sellers? If not Tanach, at least the Pentateuch! 2) WordPerfect 5.0, Turbo-fonts, Nota Bene, MultiLingual Scribe From: John Bloom Date: Thu, 27 Jul 89 01:22 EDT I have a package called "Turbo-fonts" which supports Hebrew in WP 5.0. It does a nice job (especially after cleaning up the font) on laser printers and 24-pin dot matrix, but its big problem is that it does not support the right-to-left mode of typing -- for more than one line at a time. I talked to the people about supporting this function a few months ago, and they were going to clean up the right-to-left function in a future release. I will check up on this in the next month or so. The current "Hebrew support" for WP 5.0 consists of the Hebrew characters buried off in the background as a special font that you can call up one character at a time with great difficulty. I trust that this is not what is being discussed. A truly bilingual WP would be absolutely incredible. PLEASE LET ME KNOW PERSONALLY if this rumor is true and how one goes about getting the Hebrew version of WP. It might only be available in Israel and we'd need to import it to the States. That's what I had to do in order to get a Hebrew version of dBASE III and IV. From: Tzvee Zahavy Date: Jul 28, 1989 17:25:03 I wrote Yechiel about a product coming out of an American company this fall in time for the AAR SBL meeting to adapt WP 5 for bilingual Hebrew-English. I spoke to the author who asked me to beta test the product. I hope to do that in September when I return from Israel. Accordingly, this sounds like a real and viable alternative. I hope it succeeds, so spread the word that such a product is coming. That is the only way we can continue to see the development of useful utilities. From: Ari Davidow 29 Jul 89 12:45:40 pdt To the best of my knowledge, there is no Hebrew version of WordPerfect-- although at a recent online seminar on EIES, the foreign language capabilities were touted as one solution to dealing with multi-lingual needs electronically. My personal suspicion is that for all left-to-right languages, WordPerfect is okay. Otherwise, Nota Bene is a much better solution, albeit one that is less known. From: Avrum Goodblatt Date: Mon, 31 Jul 89 23:00 IDT I am very interested in seeing Tzvee's WP Hebrew. Meanwhile, to comment on John's: There is absolutely no need to spend money on turbo-fonts. I have set up WP 5.0 to type Hebrew from right to left (again, only one line at a time) using a keyboard macro. I have printed on the HP and other printers by designing a new printer table. I have made the hidden Hebrew of edit and of view mode accessible by normal keys, just by making the proper printer table. HOWEVER, as I already wrote to John, because of limitations in WP, one cannot see Hebrew in edit AND in view - I would like to be in touch with any WP experts to explain the problem and find a solution. I AM VERY skeptical about full Hebrew in WP 5.0 It is not a trivial job to add Hebrew to a product with proportional spacing and justification. Not trivial at all. Nota Bene is supposed to be the best product out there. I will demo my simple adaptation of Wp 5.0 at the Congress. Or I can explain to you folks how I did it. Again, Turbo-fonts is absolutely not necessary and actually can get in the way! From: John Bloom Date: Tue, 1 Aug 89 01:11 EDT I will defend Turbo-fonts somewhat: We need Greek and Arabic here and they are a nice general-purpose program for getting these characters into WP. Also, their latest version (3.?) takes full advantage of the WP 5.0 printer driver routines for downloading fonts as needed, etc, and is quite elegant. However, it costs about $100 more than it is worth, I think. My experience with NB is that it is too hard for the non-hacker to become comfortable with it. Also, I had a terrible time with some of the bugs that linger in it (when we would go to print over the network); in many ways it strikes me as muscle-bound. The program of choice for me is MLS, although it has some incredible weaknesses in it. They are coming out with a new version this winter which (they claim) will resolve many of their current problems. All of this is a preface to my interest in the Hebrew-ized WP. Such a program would be a great asset as "even little kids" learn to use WP with reasonable proficiency in a month or so (once they outgrow on-screen menus). Please keep me posted, and if there are any beta-copies floating around, please send one my way.