Siddur progress
Jun. 2nd, 2010 09:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuIt's amazing to me how I can use my siddur day in, day out, and miss so many minor typos. Specifically, there are subtle differences in the font that I'm using between the qamatz and the qamatz qatan and between the sh'va nach and the sh'va na vowels, and when I'm using the siddur I'm processing a word a time so I don't notice when I've missed a conversion.
So I've been slogging through the siddur, one word at a time. I can get through about 6 pages a night, so it's going to be the better part of June until I'm done with this. So far, not a single page has escaped without at least one correction. Plus I'm making some final aesthetic tweaks to the layout, normalizing the punctuation, and I still need to do a rigorous pass on the music: (1) to make sure there are no errors, (2) to normalize the pixel resolutions of the various images, and (3) to find a better way to integrate them preserving their CMYK colors, which my current toolchain completely wrecks.
One other thing that's changing as I go is that when this was just for me, I didn't put "stage directions" in for things that I know cold. But now that there's external interest, I need to do that in a few places, and occasionally that's causing pagination issues. And that also makes for more work.
As I'm working on this, I'm realizing once again how much this project draws on my particular combination of skills. There's the knowledge of the liturgy, the computer analysis of the text, the designing of my own fonts for part of it, the research and notation of the music, the development of a toolchain to allow for the combination of the text and music, the page layout experience and taste, the knowledge of how to order print and acquire an ISBN and collect and fulfil orders.... Perhaps this siddur is one of the ways I will be able to justify my life. I'm not saying no one else could have done this, but it's great to have a project that touches on so many of my interests and calls to so many filaments of my soul.
(No, there isn't a hidden puzzle, though.)
So I've been slogging through the siddur, one word at a time. I can get through about 6 pages a night, so it's going to be the better part of June until I'm done with this. So far, not a single page has escaped without at least one correction. Plus I'm making some final aesthetic tweaks to the layout, normalizing the punctuation, and I still need to do a rigorous pass on the music: (1) to make sure there are no errors, (2) to normalize the pixel resolutions of the various images, and (3) to find a better way to integrate them preserving their CMYK colors, which my current toolchain completely wrecks.
One other thing that's changing as I go is that when this was just for me, I didn't put "stage directions" in for things that I know cold. But now that there's external interest, I need to do that in a few places, and occasionally that's causing pagination issues. And that also makes for more work.
As I'm working on this, I'm realizing once again how much this project draws on my particular combination of skills. There's the knowledge of the liturgy, the computer analysis of the text, the designing of my own fonts for part of it, the research and notation of the music, the development of a toolchain to allow for the combination of the text and music, the page layout experience and taste, the knowledge of how to order print and acquire an ISBN and collect and fulfil orders.... Perhaps this siddur is one of the ways I will be able to justify my life. I'm not saying no one else could have done this, but it's great to have a project that touches on so many of my interests and calls to so many filaments of my soul.
(No, there isn't a hidden puzzle, though.)