Brainripples

I've noticed that some of my fellow minyan-goers have various customs of responding with words that are not in the prayer book.

For example, one person responds to "mashiv ha-ruach u-morid ha-gashem" [You cause the wind to blow and the rain to fall] with "... livracha." [... for blessing.]

Another responds to each part of the priestly blessing with the usual "ken yehi ratzon" [May that be Your will] and continues "bizchut Avraham avinu" [in the merit of Abraham our father], then "bizchut Yitzchak avinu" [in the merit of Isaac our father] and finally "bizchut Yaakov avinu" [in the merit of Jacob our father].

It's got me wondering what other liturgical variations are not captured by our prayer books.

Adobe's end-of-year shutdown has started, but the kids still have school. So I have a PRODUCTIVE DAY available, and I had decided a few weeks ago that I was going to use it to get my siddur project up to date.

One thing I had considered adding was the non-musaf middle beracha for Rosh ha-Shanah. I've spent the last hour entering it and rearranging things to get it to fit, and... it doesn't, quite. I'm going to be about two lines over. So now I have to decide whether to revert to my previous checkpoint... and I'm not happy either way. I want to make this work.

So I will take a lunch break and come back to it.

In the meantime, let me share a page that I completely redid today. I wanted to bring out the poetry of the text: ( Images belong behind cut tags. Also, Shaymos. )

I really like how this page came out, and so when I get frustrated about the Rosh ha-Shanah setback, I should balance it with joy and pride in how the "Atah Hu" page looks.

"Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin's idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject---written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weigh the opposing authorities.... Don't you see that there's something wrong with that?"
-- Isaac Asimov, Foundation

( Cut for length )

As you may recall, I have been working on a text for Al ha-Nisim for Yom ha-Atzmaut. Since last year, I have had the benefit of meeting with Prof. Ruth Langer, an expert in liturgy, and she gave me some excellent advice and helped me rewrite it from scratch.

( Large image behind cut )

Feedback?

A while back, I asked your opinion between two options for laying out page 34 of my siddur. Opinions were roughly evenly divided, along the same lines as my own indecision. I tried to split the difference, and that produced unanimity --- no one liked it.

So now I have a new possibility. (This one is a little underproduced, but it's what I have time for tonight between scrubbing refrigerator shelves.) Please let me know your thoughts about

One, Two, Three, and the new candidate, Four.

Thanks!

(PS - This is one of the last remaining roadblocks preventing the second round of galley proofs.)

OK, opinion was evenly split between option 1 and option 2 --- which justifies my inability to choose one. How about option 3 instead?

So I've narrowed it down to two options at this point. Those who care about my siddur project and the page layouts, do you prefer Option 1 or Option 2?

I've been working for most evenings for the past week on "reconstituting" the bits of music notation for my siddur. That means converting the older Finale files into ones that conform to my new template, exporting them as EPS files (instead of TIFFs), and working out the entries for page, location, and color info for my python script to combine them with the text blocks.

Most of them were straightforward. But there's one page in particular that's driving me crazy. It's the one where the nusach (melody) transitions from pesukei d'zimrah (the introductory Psalms) to shacharit (the main section of the morning service). There are two versions of this transition --- one for weekdays, and one for Shabbat and holidays. Both make heavy use of reciting tones.

I just haven't been able to work out a page layout that remains logocentric, beautiful, and easy to follow. ("Pick two," as they say.) This is the hardest page in the whole book.

In the previous iteration, I actually removed the music from this page. (So if you're one of my proofreaders and you're looking at page 34 wondering what I'm babbling about, that's why.) But I miss it. When I'm leading services at that point, I like having the worked-out details to rely on. So I really want to put it back, but I haven't yet figured out HOW?!?

And it's driving me mad.

Finally was "up for air" enough tonight to re-open the Siddur project. Yay! Inventoried the music/nusach fragments that I still need to redo and redid about ten of them.

Tonight I proofread another fourteen pages, including the tricky Pesach piyyut ברח דודי. Next up is the big block of הושענות, which will be even more painful.

I also made a major breakthrough with how I'm going to integrate the musical fragments for real.

Technobabble version: The toolchain that I wrote will sorta kinda act like an OPI server. For the text, I'll print from Davkawriter to Adobe PDF, then export the PDF into individual EPS files. For the music, I will clean up my various Finale files so that each of them can be directly exported as an entire page to EPS using Finale's "Graphics Tool". My Python script will iterate over all the pages from the text, stripping any images that are embedded there, and using a separate text data file to identify which, if any, of the music EPS files need to be overlaid on each text page -- along with placement, colorization (in CMYK of course), and cropping of the music files. The output of the Python script is a huge PostScript file which can then be resubmitted to Adobe Distiller to generate the final output.

I successfully ran this script over the first page, which has a single musical example. It took two hours to get the script just right, but now I know that the approach works, and for the first time since I started this project, I feel comfortable with the results of my graphics toolchain.