DavkaWriter 7 and Siddur Sefas Yisroel
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Aharon Varady
Mar 17, 2013, 2:11:15 PM3/17/13
to Open Siddur Technical Discussion List, open...@googlegroups.com
Before this last Shabbes, Rallis Wiesenthal shared the latest version of his siddur, Siddur Sefas Yisroel (v.1.14.1). Rallis has always worked with DavkaWriter and has been kind enough to share his native DavkaWriter DWD file with me in order to convert his text to Unicode.
I just wanted to share a short review of DavkaWriter 7 after working with for about two hours last night.
Basically my work entails opening the document, choosing Export, selecting RTF file format, and UTF-16 under the format options. I redo this process selecting the plain text file format as well because it's often useful to have the plain text without any formatting.
Why UTF-16 instead of UTF-8? Choosing UTF-8 gives an error on export.
Additionally, I divide up the DWD file into 28 separate files, the various sections of Rallis's siddur. I repeat the steps above with each of the sections. The result is this table: http://opensiddur.org/2010/11/siddur-bnei-ashkenaz-a-german-rite-siddur-prepared-by-r-rallis-wiesenthal/
In this latest version of the Siddur, Rallis moved much of his commentary from inline text into footnotes. This, in my opinion, greatly improved its utility as a working, readable prayerbook.
On the other hand, none of the footnotes appeared to export with the rest of the text.
Besides this issue, the biggest problem with DavkaWriter 7 remains its oldest one: namely, Davkawriter is engineered to not work with any Hebrew fonts besides non-Unicode DavkaWriter Hebrew fonts.
I have the whole Siddur Sefas Yisroel divided into individual DWD files. I think so long as folk continue to use Davkawriter we will have issues like this. If you or anyone you know enjoys working on conversion or reverse engineering problems, please let them know of these issues. There needs to be a better DWD to ODT conversion tool than DavkaWriter's internal export feature. Davkawriter remains popular software and I worry that much digitized work will be lost to history by virtue of them depending on this proprietary software that refuses to support Unicode within its native format. All of my work on Rallis's siddur can be downloaded in one ZIP file from:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/i5i77czewv6ti5j/Siddur%20Sefas%20Yisroel%201.14.1.zip
Aharon
--
Aharon Varady
Founding Director, Hierophant
the Open Siddur Project
http://opensiddur.org
I just wanted to share a short review of DavkaWriter 7 after working with for about two hours last night.
Basically my work entails opening the document, choosing Export, selecting RTF file format, and UTF-16 under the format options. I redo this process selecting the plain text file format as well because it's often useful to have the plain text without any formatting.
Why UTF-16 instead of UTF-8? Choosing UTF-8 gives an error on export.
Additionally, I divide up the DWD file into 28 separate files, the various sections of Rallis's siddur. I repeat the steps above with each of the sections. The result is this table: http://opensiddur.org/2010/11/siddur-bnei-ashkenaz-a-german-rite-siddur-prepared-by-r-rallis-wiesenthal/
In this latest version of the Siddur, Rallis moved much of his commentary from inline text into footnotes. This, in my opinion, greatly improved its utility as a working, readable prayerbook.
On the other hand, none of the footnotes appeared to export with the rest of the text.
Besides this issue, the biggest problem with DavkaWriter 7 remains its oldest one: namely, Davkawriter is engineered to not work with any Hebrew fonts besides non-Unicode DavkaWriter Hebrew fonts.
I have the whole Siddur Sefas Yisroel divided into individual DWD files. I think so long as folk continue to use Davkawriter we will have issues like this. If you or anyone you know enjoys working on conversion or reverse engineering problems, please let them know of these issues. There needs to be a better DWD to ODT conversion tool than DavkaWriter's internal export feature. Davkawriter remains popular software and I worry that much digitized work will be lost to history by virtue of them depending on this proprietary software that refuses to support Unicode within its native format. All of my work on Rallis's siddur can be downloaded in one ZIP file from:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/i5i77czewv6ti5j/Siddur%20Sefas%20Yisroel%201.14.1.zip
Aharon
--
Aharon Varady
Founding Director, Hierophant
the Open Siddur Project
http://opensiddur.org
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