Re: "G-d"/Yiddish word processing

[Ari Davidow <ari...>]

>Okay, I need another bit of help.  For those of you who type Yiddish and
>have done so for lyrics on an "album", what program have you used?  I
>haven't found anything easy enough for me to use that has all the
>Yiddish characters needed.  Any suggestions from you wonderful crew?

The short answer is that there isn't an easy answer. There are no good 
typesetting programs that are generally available which also support 
Hebrew-alphabet languages, including vowels and typing in logical order. 
Although Unicode support is coming, my understanding is that there are also 
generally no font encoding/keyboard mapping choices, either, so whatever 
solution you find, is likely to be useful only within its own world.

Depending on which computer you are using (Linux, Mac, Windows, most 
generally), there are solutions that may well be good enough for your effort. 
This is where a consult of the good folks at the Yiddish Information Processing 
list might be helpful--see http://www.yv.org/uyip/ for some FAQs and general 
info on the mailing list.

I've just written a filter to take some stuff written in Word using some old 
Yiddish fonts, and make it work on a Mac with Israeli encodings+Yiddish, but 
that's entirely custom work, and the type is actually stored in display order, 
rather than logical order (which doesn't matter--we're displaying this, and 
it's already been edited all that needs to be). It's often that painful if 
you're not working on a dedicated typesetting system, =and= need better than 
word-processed text.

Whatever you do, do line up the Latin- and Hebrew-alphabet stuff so that it 
relates.

ari


Ari Davidow
ari (at) ivritype(dot)com
list owner, jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org
the klezmer shack: http://www.klezmershack.com/

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