The Open Siddur Project » Open Siddur Project http://opensiddur.org sharing the ingredients of Jewish spiritual practice for the craft and design of new siddurim Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:07:23 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Testing Web browsers as Platforms for Hebrew Text Publishing http://opensiddur.org/2012/01/testing-web-browsers-as-platforms-for-hebrew-text-publishing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=testing-web-browsers-as-platforms-for-hebrew-text-publishing http://opensiddur.org/2012/01/testing-web-browsers-as-platforms-for-hebrew-text-publishing/#comments Mon, 02 Jan 2012 05:49:55 +0000 Aharon Varady http://opensiddur.org/?p=4262 Given that one important aspiration of the Open Siddur Project is the development of a web application for anyone to edit, maintain, and share the content of a personal prayerbook that they can craft online, I’m very concerned at how well web browsers today display the Hebrew language with all of its diacritical (vowels, cantillation) . . . → Read More: Testing Web browsers as Platforms for Hebrew Text Publishing]]> Given that one important aspiration of the Open Siddur Project is the development of a web application for anyone to edit, maintain, and share the content of a personal prayerbook that they can craft online, I’m very concerned at how well web browsers today display the Hebrew language with all of its diacritical (vowels, cantillation) marks. Indeed, the Open Siddur Project has an international scope, so ostensibly, we wish to support text in every language Jews speak or have ever spoken liturgy or liturgy-related text (the creative content of Jewish spiritual practice). Combine a digital font or fonts that support the full range of human written languages with a platform that correctly displays such fonts, and you have one basis for an excellent potential collaborative publishing platform.

So for the last year, I’ve been working on a series of tests to determine how well some popular and some less well-known web browsers perform in supporting the technology for displaying Hebrew text. In particular, I’m interested to see which browsers are failing to use a web standard called CSS @font-face to properly display Unicode Hebrew fonts that support the full range of Hebrew diacritics and which contain excellent font logic for diacritical positioning. I’m also keen on seeing which browsers might even be failing at recognizing bidirectional (BIDI) and right-to-left (RTL) text, given that Hebrew is read RTL and it’s not uncommon to find עִבְרִית and other left-to-right (LTR) languages written together with one another.

With these tests I also hoped to find some simple way by which an individual browsing the web could troubleshoot whether the problem is in their browser, their browser’s settings, or in a web page, when they find a web page that is poorly displaying Hebrew. I learned a great deal in the process and so I also made a page for web designer/coders to learn the correct way to craft a web page that will correctly display Hebrew.

This post was originally posted to Aharon’s Omphalos.

]]> http://opensiddur.org/2012/01/testing-web-browsers-as-platforms-for-hebrew-text-publishing/feed/ 1 Public policy, technology, and copyright in Halakha: a sourcesheet http://opensiddur.org/2011/10/public-policy-technology-and-copyright-in-halakha-a-sourcesheet/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=public-policy-technology-and-copyright-in-halakha-a-sourcesheet http://opensiddur.org/2011/10/public-policy-technology-and-copyright-in-halakha-a-sourcesheet/#comments Tue, 18 Oct 2011 04:56:38 +0000 The Hierophant http://opensiddur.org/?p=4115 Efraim Feinstein shared the sourcesheet for his late night shiur (lesson) on copyright in Rabbinic Halakhah (Jewish law). Efraim's research adds a great deal of important perspective to our work here on the Open Siddur Project. It provides relevant historical context for our work advocating the adoption of free culture principles and free-culture licenses to facilitate sharing (tachlis) within the Jewish world. . . . → Read More: Public policy, technology, and copyright in Halakha: a sourcesheet]]>

Image: "Copyright Khaf" by Aharon Varady (License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported)

Last Sukkot 5771 (2011), Efraim Feinstein shared the sourcesheet for his late night shiur (lesson) on copyright in Rabbinic Halakhah (Jewish law). Efraim’s research adds a great deal of important perspective to our work here on the Open Siddur Project. It provides relevant historical context for our work advocating the adoption of free culture principles and free-culture licenses to facilitate sharing (tachlis) within the Jewish world.

Efraim’s sourcesheet is shared (along with the TEX formatted source code and content for his sourcesheet) via his account on tumblr. For the sake of redundancy and redistribution, here is a direct link to downloading a PDF of his sourcesheet:

DOWNLOAD: PDF | TEX (source).

]]> http://opensiddur.org/2011/10/public-policy-technology-and-copyright-in-halakha-a-sourcesheet/feed/ 0 Welcome to the Open Siddur Project http://opensiddur.org/2011/04/welcome-to-the-open-siddur-project/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=welcome-to-the-open-siddur-project http://opensiddur.org/2011/04/welcome-to-the-open-siddur-project/#comments Mon, 11 Apr 2011 19:42:58 +0000 The Hierophant http://opensiddur.org/?p=3062 The Open Siddur Project is building it, online, on the web: a collaborative digital-to-print publishing application where you can make your own siddur, share your work, and adopt, adapt, and redistribute work shared by others -- work intended for creative reuse and inclusion in new siddurim and related works of Jewish spiritual practice.

Imagine a social network focused on publishing built around privacy, collaboration, and a public database and digital library of Jewish liturgy in a format that can easily show historical variations and changes across Jewish traditions, manuscripts, and facsimile editions. Imagine a collection of text and recordings, freely licensed for creative reuse in every language Jews pray in or have ever prayed. Reimagine your siddur, custom tailored to your practice, replete with your insights and those selected from your friends, family, and the complete corpus of Jewish tradition, and a record of your family's and community's minhagim and nusaḥ.

We're not there yet. (Progress towards version 1.0 is tracked on our development roadmap; we're currently at 0.4.4).

In the meantime, take a look at the prayers, translations, exercises, art, and recordings that folk are already sharing with free/libre licenses that permit their creative reuse. That means that you can use these works right now in the creation of new siddurim (alas, offline) while we continue developing the Open Siddur web application. There's a list of free/libre and open source software and fonts that can help you do that right now.

Please start a conversation with us, join this project by sharing your own work, introduce yourself on our technical and non-technical discussion lists, and begin to imagine the siddur and spiritual practice you've always wanted. . . . → Read More: Welcome to the Open Siddur Project]]> Imagine a printing press and book arts studio shared by everyone in the world looking to design and craft their own siddur.

The Open Siddur Project is building it, online, on the web: a collaborative digital-to-print publishing application where you can make your own siddur, share your work, and adopt, adapt, and redistribute work shared by others — work intended for creative reuse and inclusion in new siddurim and related works of Jewish spiritual practice.

Imagine a social network focused on publishing built around privacy, collaboration, and a public database and digital library of Jewish liturgy in a format that can easily show historical variations and changes across Jewish traditions, manuscripts, and facsimile editions. Imagine a collection of text and recordings, freely licensed for creative reuse in every language Jews pray in or have ever prayed. Reimagine your siddur, custom tailored to your practice, replete with your insights and those selected from your friends, family, and the complete corpus of Jewish tradition, and a record of your family’s and community’s minhagim and nusaḥ.

We’re not there yet. (Progress towards version 1.0 is tracked on our development roadmap; we’re currently at 0.4.4).

In the meantime, take a look at the prayers, translations, exercises, art, and recordings that folk are already sharing with free/libre licenses that permit their creative reuse. That means that you can use these works right now in the creation of new siddurim (alas, offline) while we continue developing the Open Siddur web application. There’s a list of free/libre and open source software and fonts that can help you do that right now.

Please start a conversation with us, join this project by sharing your own work, introduce yourself on our technical and non-technical discussion lists, and begin to imagine the siddur and spiritual practice you’ve always wanted.

]]> http://opensiddur.org/2011/04/welcome-to-the-open-siddur-project/feed/ 0