Hebrew Massorah

[Philip Brown]

Just a note of clarification. The fonts in BibleWorks that begin with Bw (Bwhebb, Bwhebl, bwgrkl, etc.) were created by BibleWorks, not SBL. Only the font "SBL Hebrew" or other SP-prefixed fonts are SBL licensed.

Also, Bwhebb does contain the inverted nun. Type Alt + 0382 to get it. It does not contain crowned letters.

[ugotdave]

All,

I am still pursuing this quest to copy Ginsburg's work, although purchasing a copy of Ginsburg's work is possible, $$$$$$, it's not probable for me economically.
I have a local Christian college checking it's resources to obtain a copy. They located 3 such copies, but I am not certain that they will be able to "reel the catch in".

Again, does anyone have any suggestions on a specific Hebrew Word Processor to use for this daunting project.

I was also reading in the forum and found that the SBL Hebrew font should work for recreating the Massorah, it has the inverted 'Nun' and some of the other characters needed.
Has anyone used this font, and what's your opinion on its use for this project?

Any tips, tricks, suggestions, or real life experiences are welcome to help me out with this task. Please feel free to send me an email or post them in the forum.

Thanks,

David Morris

P.S. If there are others who want to join in on this huge project, please feel free!
As a team we can accomplish this task! I am only one man, and I am willing to go it alone if I have to. That's how much I believe in this work.

[MWMiles]

P.S. If there are others who want to join in on this huge project, please feel free!
As a team we can accomplish this task! I am only one man, and I am willing to go it alone if I have to. That's how much I believe in this work.

I'm working on some sources for material. It's been literally years since I explored the idea of an electronic version of Ginsburg's collation of the Massorah. I believe that Windows 98 was all the rage back then..

I very strongly believe in the value of this work and would love to see something done with it. I was made aware of the value of the work years ago and I consider it a great shame that it is not freely available - not just in BibleWorks.

I personally would be of the mind at first glance to use a font that has no licensing restrictions and that would be open for additions and/or changes, even if that means taking an open source or public domain Hebrew font and doing some work on it. You're going to need to make changes and additions to the font as you work and the license for the SBL font may not allow that. OTOH, you could use the SBL font for most of the work, and make another font with all of the odd characters and letters. Have you contacted BibleWorks about using their font? They seem to be rather easy going about sharing that resource - at least they have been so in the past.

[Adelphos]

...Again, does anyone have any suggestions on a specific Hebrew Word Processor to use for this daunting project.

David,

I've tried Nota Bene, Word, and a few other word processors and I find Davka Writer to be far and away head and shoulders above them all.

The link is http://www.davkawriter.com/index.html

With Davka you can with a mere keystroke switch between Hebrew and English and have the formatting perfectly preserved.

With a mere keystroke you switch to left-right/right-left and have the formatting perfectly preserved.

I could go on and on. Nothing I've seen even comes remotely close to Davka's Hebrew and English capabilities.

The only drawback with Davka is they have continued to make their fonts proprietary. They are apparently too paranoid to understand that this only harms them in the long run.

However, their latest version appears to be fully compatible with unicode, so the font issue is not really an issue.

That aside, their program greatly facilitates Hebrew and English typing, and as I said, far, far better than anything else I've seen.

[MWMiles]

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[Michael Hanel]

Sounds like an exciting prospect! I look forward to hearing more about it and good luck getting people together to help out. You might try dropping word at some other Bible-related blogs to see if you can get any other volunteers.

[MWMiles]

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[MWMiles]

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[Clint Yale]

I read with interest posts on creating an electronic edition of Ginsburg. I have a few questions.
How well is the OCR software you are using picking up the Hebrew characters?
What percentage of the page is German and what percentage is Hebrew?

OmniPage Pro will pick up the German at about a 99% accuracy rate. You will have to have crate a cut and paste sheet for the letters with umlauts that the OCR fails to pick up. The great thing about OCR is that it preserves the commas, periods, brackets parenthesis on each page. I would scan two pages at a time and then put them al together in several sections or by each book. I would not let your word processor do the pagination. Put the page numbers in manually by a tag.
If your accuracy rate is low then you will need to bone up on your typing skills and rapid Hebrew reading.
I have learned using Omnipage Pro in various versions that about the best output you will receive is a txt.file that will need more typing than you will care to hear about. Until Unicode has all the characters you need to do this project I would opt for the Ascii equivalents and then place characters that have no equivalents in sgml tags. How do I know this I typed out the two volumes of Tischendorf's Critical Apparatus, I have scanned, typed and proofed Gregory's TEXTKRITIK and am presently working on von Soden's critical apparatus. About 7500 pages of type-challenged text.
That is my 2 cents for now.
Clint Yale
Bellingham,WA

[MWMiles]

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