Hebrew Class

6 Comments July 24, 2020 Steve Wiggins

It is utterly remarkable that in this year of the Common Era 2020 that even in Unicode you can’t write Hebrew in Microsoft Word without gymnastics. The task at work was a fairly simple one: proofread the Hebrew in a typeset manuscript ready for the printer. This means the manuscript is a PDF at this point and to get Hebrew to appear in a comment bubble you need to copy it from Word and paste it in. But wait! Word only has some Hebrew letters in its Symbols menu. Try getting a yod to appear. I looked up a Unicode chart, copied and pasted the Unicode unique identifier and Word gave me a capital P. Not a jot or tittle to be found. So, to get the yod I had to fetch my personal Mac and use the language menu and type the word out. Copy. Paste in an email from my personal account to my work account. Wait. Open work email message. Copy again. Paste again.

Using this method, a task that would take me maybe twenty minutes stretched into hours. There was simply no way to get Microsoft Word to display a full Hebrew alphabet shy of changing the language on the computer. And since I don’t read Modern Hebrew I had a feeling that would lead to disaster. Part of the problem is that programmers thought it would be smart to make Unicode Hebrew automatically appear right to left. This has been the bane of many of us since the earliest word processors tried to replicate the language. We grew used to typing it in backwards. Now you never know which letter is going to disappear if you hit delete—it doesn’t help that it can act differently on a Mac than on your standard business-issue PC. Not only that, but when you paste it the receiving document often automatically reverses word order. Can I get a pen and paper over here?

I sometimes jokingly lament the hold that technology has on us. In some instances the joking takes on a serious tone, I know. I do wonder about having techies drive where we’re going. It’s one thing to make it possible to print Hebrew letters in electronic form, but it is quite another to read them and have a sense of what they’re saying. And those of us challenged by the whole right-left orientation and a cursor blinking on one side of a word but having its effect on the other wonder if it’s worth the effort. There’s a reason ancient people wrote in clay, it seems.

Nightmares with Nightmares

Leave a comment July 10, 2020 Steve Wiggins

Although some staff members are furloughed, Nightmares with the Bible is still going to press. Unlike many authors, I realize that Covid-19 has had a stifling effect on publishing, starting with bottlenecking books at printing houses. Printers (along with publishers) were non-essential businesses and since you have to be physically present to run a printing press, the virus literally, well, stopped the presses. Many publishers could work remotely, so the projects began piling up before printing houses reopened. All of this is preamble to saying I am gratified that work with Nightmares is continuing. Yesterday, however, it led to a nightmare of its own.

One of the reasons I don’t fight awaking early is that it is uninterrupted writing time. Most of the rest of your time zone is asleep at three a.m., so I can write in peace. Yesterday, however, I had to divide my manuscript into chapter files and resend it to the publisher. No problem, right? Technology, however, has made this once simple task a burden. I use a Mac, and so my word processor is Pages. Not only that, but the constant systems upgrades require me to empty space on my hard drive—really, the only stuff I keep on here are my writings and those pictures I snap with my phone. Still, I had to load my external drive to access the final file sent to the publisher two months back. With Pages you can’t select material from page-to-page in the thumbnails. No, you must “physically” go to the start of the chapter, click, scroll to the end of the chapter, and shift-click to highlight and then copy it. Then you have to open a new file, select a template, and paste. Save and export as a Word document. The process took about two hours.

Now, I get up this early to write and do a little reading. Yesterday I could do neither. Instead I was cutting and pasting like a manic kindergartener, trying to get my manuscript printed before the second wave comes and shuts everything down again. Talk about your nightmares! Technology has made the industry much swifter, no doubt. When I first began publishing articles you had to send physical printouts through the postal services and await either a rejection, or acceptance, through the mail. Book manuscripts required large print jobs and keeping duplicates (at least we didn’t have to use carbon paper!). All I lost was a morning of writing before the work bell rang. Still, nightmares come in all sizes, some of them quite small.

Bibliographic Blues

2 Comments October 3, 2019 Steve Wiggins

Now, I don’t know how often you have to compile a bibliography, but it’s harder than it used to be. Some time ago—my hardware’s a bit aged, so I can’t remember exactly when—Apple products wouldn’t run Microsoft software. In one of those turf wars that occasionally break out among those who vie for technical control of the world, the two companies divorced for a period. As a result, when I open Word files on my Mac, they become “Pages” documents. That’s fine; since I use a variety of word processors I can usually figure them out fairly readily. One thing, however, that both Word and Pages do is to assume they know what you’re trying to do. Software engineers control “smart options” so that when, for example, you’re working on a numbered list (or lettered list) it automatically goes to the next number or letter, formatting happily as it goes.

I have an article coming out in a collection of essays and I had to put a bibliography together. One of the books was, unfortunately, written by an author who styled himself with an initial for his first name. Since that initial was “A.” I had great difficulty convincing Pages (as I would have Word) that I was not trying to start a lettered list. I was trying to build a bibliography. No matter what I did—copy and paste, retype, hit “delete” til my fingers bled—it simply would not change this A. from a numbered list (just as it likes to capitalize the word that comes after a period automatically) to regular text. I finally had to retype the whole entry, careful not to put the first initial first, so that Pages wouldn’t reform everything with no option to shut that feature off. I later snuck in while Pages was dozing and added the A.

Early on, I admit, the footnote function in Word saved premature graying. Having typed—literally typed—many a college paper only to find that I’d misjudged the spacing required for footnotes and having to retype the entire page, I appreciated this auto-function. It was great to have an option where an algorithm could figure out all the spacing for you, and all you had to do was enter data. Now, however, word processors think in terms of the lowest common denominator. If you begin with “A.” you naturally will be progressing to “B.” Apparently there is no other reason that a sentient being would begin with “A.” And of course bibliography begins with “B.”

How do I list this?

TechnoFrazzle

Leave a comment February 1, 2014 Steve Wiggins

Hebrew can be an obstinate language. And computer software companies can be immature. In a biblically inspired pulling out of the hair and rending of mine cloak, I am trying to submit an old manuscript for publication. You see, I have been a loyal Apple user from the beginning; Moses himself was one of my original teachers. This was back in the day when the processor took up proportionately about 90 percent of the space, and the screen was about the size of, say, an iPad. Monitors were black-and-white then, kids, and you had to save everything on devices called “floppy disks.” In any case, Macs died and Macs resurrected—actually, they never really die, as an attic full of aging, but document-rich Macs attests. Operating systems evolved at a frightening rate, and the document I want to submit was originally written *gasp!* about eight years ago. The Dark Ages. Before OSX. Before Keurig individual serving machines. When fax was still used.

The publisher made a simple request: send us a Word document. The problem, you see, is that Apple no longer runs software based on Microsoft platforms (Bill and Steve, play nice!). That means instead of Word I now use Pages. That’s mostly fine, but then Hebrew can be an obstinate language. It is written backwards. The vowels are above and below the consonants. It has letters that English doesn’t and most English speakers can’t even pronounce. So geeky font-makers came to the rescue and devised clever fonts to fill the gaps. In Word. I convert my old file into Pages so I can open it on a laptop that actually connects to the internet (the laptop on which it was written never could quite manage that) and guess what? Pages can’t display the fonts. I convert them, but like stubborn infidels, they remain the same on my screen. It is like driving through a blizzard with windshield wipers that don’t work. I can’t be sure what a PC reader, using that antique software, Microsoft Word, will see on the screen. I’m not sure what I’m writing.

I remember the rejoicing in heaven the day Apple announced that you could open a PC file in Word on a Mac. My life was easier, except for the fact that I was unfortunately working at Nashotah House—but that is a different story of archaic woes, for I could slip in a floppy disc (consult your dictionary) and share it with a less-sophisticated PC user. Now Mac OSX no longer supports Microsoftware and I can’t read my own fonts. I decide to copy the file onto a flash drive and submit it unchanged. My old laptop scratches its metaphorical head at this strange device I’m inserting into it and tells me this wondrous USB-deity is beyond its capacity to fathom. My Hebrew is stuck in the past. Along with my head, which, as you’ve been given to understand, is now bereft of hair.