Mellel's Newsletter #2 contains some details about our upcoming Mellel 1.6, some baseless besmearing of the Unicode Consortium and in the tips department a short review of some of the free Bible sites around, for those who wish to extract the content into Mellel.
Table of Contents:
Mellel News:
What's going on:
Mellel Tips:
Mellel News
We're the Greatest (third time) -- Not that we want to brag or anything (but we do, we do) but the month of May have been as full of spirit as the month of May for us. Mac Life has smiled upon us, then it was the Mac Night Owl burning with favourable reviews only to be replaced a day later by the tropes of William Porter's Polytrope Blog and, lastly The Northern Spy.
What's in 1.6 -- We feel slightly deflated now, after tooting our own horn so diligently, but Mellel 1.6 is at the gates, and some initial details are due.
Mellel 1.6 was originally scheduled to be our "language release." That is, we planned to cram in as many new language-related features as possible. It remains so, but we've also added some additional stuff. Here are the highlights:
- Arabic and Farsi: At long last, it is in. Apart from the right to left support which is already in, we added contextuallity and fixed some Unicode problems.
- Even More Languages: We've added or improved support for a bunch of languages essential for some scholars, like Etruscan (including support for boustrophedon writing), Thaana, Assyrian, Deseret. Gothic, and more.
- Tabs: At long last, all the missing tabs are now in place, including decimal tab, right tab (counter-direction tab, to be accurate) and centre tab.
- Show Hidden Characters: Oh yeah! Great! We now have what any decent word processor has. :-) We do it nicely, though, with an option to set your display preferences in the preferences and on the fly.
- Surrogates: Added support for surrogate Unicode characters to improve input in CJK and some other languages. Also, the famed Code 2001 font is now usable.
- Hebrew fonts: We've added support to using old PostScript fonts, old Yeda fonts and more. Basically, almost any old Hebrew font can be used with Mellel now under Mac OS X.
- And Much more: We have quite a few surprises up our sleeve. Hopefully, most of them will be ready in time for the beta.
What's Going On
Let's all unite for the Hittite -- It isn't nice to be a party pooper, but sometimes you must. The Unicode standard Consortium was established by a number of prominent computer companies in 1991 for a fairly simple purpose: "to provide a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language."
Initially, the consortium intended to offer a minimal number of ligatures (characters that are a combination of two or more characters) in Unicode. The idea behind this was that the Unicode standard will provide the characters and complex combinations will be provided via additional technologies.
This rather puristic idea soon crumbled under pressures from Europe and Japan to add additional ligatures and combinations to fit their needs. This quickly resulted in an extremely patched Unicode blocks map with no less than 10 extensions to Latin and an even larger number of extensions for the purpose of CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages.
But the spotted map of Unicode blocks was the least harmful result of the Unicode Consortium law level of resistance. The 'appeasement' policy had an effect of convincing all connected to the standard that 'might is right'. If you are able and willing to apply some pressure, you will get your way and have your favourite characters added to the standard, regardless of any extrinsic standard of usability or even common sense.
The latest sanctioned and sanctified Unicode character chart (version 4.0) gives ample example to the levels of silliness the standard descended to. The Asian power combo of Devanagari, Bengali and Gujarati and Thai written by around 1.3 billion people get all together, 276 precious slots in the Unicode charts. Compare that with the 211 characters generously given to "Linear B" -- the mother of all dead languages. One might claim here that the needs of Gujarati and Devanagari are, perhaps, more humble than those of dead languages like Deseret, Aegean or Runic. Sadly, is far from being the case.
Hebrew gives another fine example to the twisted logic developing where might is right. The Hebrew range contains 125 characters in two sections. Of those, more than half are completely useless when writing modern Hebrew including several blatant mistakes (i.e. ligatures that doesn't even exist in Hebrew). All this, while the real needs of writing in Hebrew are left unanswered. The reason for this aggravating situation is simple: Hebrew, much like Gujarati or Devanagari, does not enjoy the lobbying power Cuneiform Ugarit buffs have.
The Future of Music (cont.) -- Apple's newly launched "iTunes" music store discussed in Newsletter #1 turns out to be a success. For the time being, that is. With more than two million songs sold in a little over two weeks it suddenly looks like the Music Industry last hope for a decent and workable online-sales model.
As usual with Apple, the store is not just a store but also a proof on concept experiment. If proven successful, it will be emulated and copied by all the other players in the market, just as it happened with prior technologies and concepts Apple adopted like USB, iMac, Wi-Fi, Aqua interface, iPod and so on.
One of the more interesting concept Apple introduced with the iTunes store is an attempt to create a right management system that will be acceptable for both users and music companies. Songs downloaded from the store are sold to buyers under a fairly non-restrictive usage agreement: a buyer can play the music on up to three computers, burn it to a CD up to 10 times. In contrast, subscription services like PressPlay which is based on Microsoft technology are imposing rather draconian agreement terms by which users are licensed a revocable right to only play the music and even that only as long as they are subscribed to the service.
That doesn't mean that the Apple system is flawless. Charly Avital, a subscriber to our Newsletter, tried to send a song he purchased as a present but discovered that this cannot be done directly (via email, for example) as the song will refuse to play on an "unregistered" system.
Mellel Tips
And Bible for All -- One rarely thinks of the Bible as something hard to come by. After all, the Bible is the ongoing best seller of all times, re-printed every year in every imaginable shape or form. Getting it in an easily accessible electronic form, however, is a slightly different matter. Turning the bible into a Mellel document turns out to be an entirely different matter.
One of the most impressing sources for viewing the Bible is the Bible Gateway, which offers various versions of the bible in no less than 29 languages. The inclusion of some (Maori, Haitian) is somewhat surprising, but not nearly as much as the omission of Hebrew and Greek, the two languages of the old and new testament. This impressive collection (especially when it comes to English versions of the Bible) is organised by books and chapters, which makes it hard to "extract" content by copy and paste into Mellel. Copying the text in the Chinese version is faulty and the Arabic version will raise some brows among those accustomed to read it from right to left. The people at the Bible Gateway think it should be the other way around.
The Ethnic Harvest site seems much more promising, offering links to bibles in more than 140 languages. Some of the links are false and some are broken, but if you're determined enough you're bound to find a download-able or easily extractable copy of the Bible in almost every living language (and some that are dead).
Even more useful is the Unbound Bible which offers 128 Bible versions for download as a simple text file. Usually, this is all that's needed, although the Hebrew versions of the Bible here cannot be used with Mellel (they are ordered as "visual" Hebrew). For the brave of heart, the FTP site would be even more useful for easy download of the versions.
Another useful general source is offered by Bible.com, which offers an extensive reference page to many sites offering the Bible. Some of the sites are not very useful for extraction of the text into Mellel. Some are. At the bottom of the reference page you may find useful reference to sites for download, parallel versions and similar treats. The Hebrew version offered here is again "visual" and therefore useless.
Diving into the Bible sea, it gradually becomes clear that the best way to find a download-able version is the simple one: Go to Google, choose your language, type the word "Bible" in your language and there you have it. Even better, searching by the name of a well known edition (Derby, Luther, Vulgata, Reina Valera, Douay, Rheims, and so on) will focus the results even further. For example, a short search within French sites for the well known Osterwald Bible quickly found Les Pensées de Sophie, which includes a great collection of around 20 French versions of the Bible.
This was also the key to finding a Hebrew proper version of the Bible. Machon Mamre offers here a wonderful variety of versions, all ready to be Mellelised. Here you will find an unpointed, pointed and pointed with cantillation marks versions, parallel versions and even full versions of the Oral Law.
More DICTionaries -- Fr. Aaron Peters, O.S.B points to yet another free dictionary using the DICT protocol called Icarus DICTionary. This free dictionary may be downloaded from here.
