12 Sep 90 JUDAIC STUDIES #52 22 Elul 50 BS"D Judaic Studies is the newsletter of He'Asif, one of the Saf Projects. Edited by Y. Greenbaum. To send information, address it to judaica@taunivm. To obtain further information, send the command GET JUDAICA FILELIST as the first line in the text of mail to listserv@taunivm. CONTENTS 1) Scripture Fonts, Dagesh, Shapirit 2) Hebrew patches to WordPerfect 3) Change of address 1) Scripture Fonts, Dagesh, Shapirit From: Marc Bregman Date: Fri, 7 Sep 1990 16:26 IST The add-on to Wordperfect that lets you do Hebrew (with nikkud) and Greek with Diacriticals is Scripture Fonts. I just got a brochure and some sample printouts from John J. Hughes (*Bits, Bytes & Biblical Studies*) who is the production manager at Zondervan Electronic Publishing who produced and market it. You can contact him by bitnet: XB.J24@STANFORD. Or phone (406) 862-7280, FAX (406) 862-1124. Or call Mark Rice (616) 698-3205. The Dagesh Professional sounds very interesting. Do any other JSNL subscribers have any personal experience with it? Particularly (since it sounds like it runs in Graphics mode like Multilingual Scholar) how does it perform on the now somewhat outmoded XT's most of us have here in Israel? Also, any comments on Megawriter from those with hands on experience would be greatly appreciated. Personally, I use the Israeli version of Nota Bene 3.0 ("Shapirit"). In my experience so far it is fine for working in English and Hebrew, but is less suitable for those who need to do additional character sets: Hebrew Nikkud, Greek with Diacriticals, International Character set, etc. Marc Bregman, Hebrew Union College, Jerusalem [HPUBM at HUJIVM1] 2) Hebrew patches to WordPerfect From: JOHN BLOOM Date: Mon, 10 Sep 90 03:03 EDT Dan Breslauer's description has stimulated some good guessing about what he had in mind. What he had seen, however was Multi-Lingual Scholar, as Sasson suspected. It is available from Gamma Productions, 710 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 609, Santa Monica, CA 90401, (213) 394-8622. It's not cheap, $350 for dot matrix, $500 for laser/dot matrix, but prints well on lasers, and is fairly simple to use (although it has a personality, like they all do). There are now three patches to Word Perfect available that give you real Hebrew capability with it -- to various degrees: 1) Turbofonts: Image Processing Software, 6409 Appalachian Way, POB 5016, Madison Wisconsin, 53705 (608) 233-5033. This package gives you roughly 256-512 characters of ANYTHING you want -- it has a library of over a 1000 characters and a font editor to customize any or them. It supports dot matrix and laser, and gives reasonable results, including diacritics. It's Arabic is not that great, but better than writing it by hand. The right-to- left languages can be entered in this way in WP, but you need to fill the area with blank spaces first as it uses typeover mode to give you the reverse direction. Going from one line to the next in Hebrew is thus tricky. Cost: around $200. 2) Scripture fonts: Zondervan Electronic publishing, 1415 Lake Drive SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 49506 (616) 698-6900. This package is the new kid on the block, and gives you Hebrew and Greek with diacritics. It gives you right-to-left Hebrew by using the WP 5.1 flush right feature built into a handfull of convenient WP macros. It does type from line to line well, but can give you problems when you go back and try to edit the Hebrew lines heavily. Tough to beat at the price: list $80. 3) Hebrew DOS: MicroSoft has an Israeli version of DOS 3.3 that gives you genuine right-to-left character entry for any DOS application. In WP it does some funny things with the English help screens when you are in Hebrew mode, but you can really compose and edit full Hebrew documents with it very smoothly (I don't really recommend it for the scholarly paper that is mostly English with a sprinkling of Hebrew). Cost is not too bad: list $170, but you need to figure out how to print the Hebrew characters yourself (no Hebrew hard or soft fonts are provided). The package does support the Hewlett Packard Hebrew font cartridge (the "WordMill" cartridge), but this costs an additional $300 or so. All of the above programs assume that you have an EGA or VGA monitor. MLS works best on an AT, since it does everything in graphics mode. None of these programs is the universal solution, but any one or two will solve your Hebrew and special character needs on the IBM. To be complete, one should also mention Nota Bene, which does a reasonable job with the Hebrew and Greek, although I consider it hard to learn and its Hebrew font to be ugly. After all of this information, I should add that I am a dealer in the above and can offer people a 15-20% discount off the list prices given. People should also be aware that WP is available at $140 for educators, and I can supply people with the coupon for this if their school computer people do not already have one available. Please feel free to contact me with questions on the above packages or any others which you are aware of but which I have missed. I try to keep up on these things. I'm hoping that Windows 3.0 will allow the software writers to start doing some nice multi-lingual work within its environment, but such things are a year away. Word Perfect has admitted that they are developing their own Hebrew language support for their product, and it should be out by next summer. What it can really do --- we will have to wait and see. John Bloom BLOOM@ANNENRES (215) 362-8062 3) Change of address From: Michael Swartz Date: Wed, 12 Sep 1990 10:14 IST Dear Colleagues, I am writing to inform you of my address in Jerusalem, where I will be on Sabbatical leave from the University of Virginia for the coming academic year. My Bitnet address is: HNUSM@HUJIVM1. My mailing address is: Department of Jewish History, Hebrew University, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel. This address should be valid at least until next June. Best wishes to everyone. cordially, Michael Swartz Received: from BITNET by ILNCRD; Mon, 12 Nov 90 00:45 IST Received: by HUJIVMS via NJE (HUyMail-V5i); Mon, 12 Nov 90 00:33:56 +0200 Received: from TAUNIVM by TAUNIVM.TAU.AC.IL (Mailer R2.03B) with BSMTP id 8161; Mon, 12 Nov 90 00:32:43 IST Date: Mon, 12 Nov 90 00:30:00 IST From: Yechiel Greenbaum Subject: Judaic Studies 57 Sender: Judaic Studies Newsletter To: Multiple recipients of Reply-to: Yechiel Greenbaum