@IsaacMoses - "When you print this document out for your own use, we hope you'll consider printing out an extra copy to give to a friend. " I'm going to print a whole stack of extra copies and put them on the rack that people will walk past to pick up their Pesach wine orders on Sunday morning! :-) (And pitch it at the minyan on Shabbat, of course.) anticipation...
I'm just really amazed at how quickly and well this all came together. Yasher kochachem and congratulations to @Jin and all the folks who spent lots of time and aren't being paid for this! Thanks!
Should a parent bless a child resting one hand or both?
The question was answered by-the-way in an answer on a different question. Is this considered duplicate?
If not - should the answer be copied/linked to/other?
@IsaacMoses @MonicaCellio @msh210 and others, i put up a template MS Word file here. I also included a PDF version so you know how it'd look as it is on my computer (in case your version of Word formats differently).
I've been using the table of content you put together as a guide. I've put up a few questions in the template, up to "If God had not delivered us from Egypt we would still be slaves"? Really?
formatting is fairly straight forward. just copy the question title and body. change question title to Heading 1 in Word, and the body text to 11pt. you can copy and paste that floral divider to new questions. it's just an image.
I also plan to add a background pattern to the cover page, behind the logo, but i couldn't figure out how to do it in Word without messing up the format. I'll keep on trying.
@Jin since @IsaacMoses volunteered to do the work and he's fine with Word, sounds good to me! (I'm glad he's doing this; I've not had great luck going from Pages to Word without formatting blunders on my Mac, and I don't own a copy of Word.)
@Jin nice! I love how you incorporated the "scrollwork" graphic from the site between the questions and answers. How do you recommend we add the title to the front page? Above the logo? Below? Any font recommendations etc?
@Jin Thanks! Unless you object, I think I'm going to use H1 for section titles ("Introduction," "קַדֵּשׁ / Kadesh", "עֲבָדִים הָיִינוּ ..." / "We were slaves ...") with the orange border around them, use H2 for question titles without the border, and set the TOC to grab only from H1. I may add a page break before each H1. I'll also de-italicize the List Paragraph style. ...
... Given that we're using a TOC, we'll need page numbers, so I'll add those, probably at bottom-center, and in a small Georgia.
... Do you know a way to switch between letter and A4 sizes for output purposes without changing the pagination?
@MonicaCellio Yes; unless someone else signals that they're picking it up before then, I'll pick up this document at about 8pm CDT tonight and at least get it to the point where all the content is in it. I would appreciate if someone else could commit to picking it up from there to proofread and then generate the final .pdfs, preferably by ~COB tomorrow.
(By which I mean, commit today to get it done by COB tomorrrow.)
@Jin @MonicaCellio Could you please get an email address of someone at SE who can receive the PDFs tomorrow late afternoon / early evening, put them somewhere public-facing and permanent, and provide URLs back (or just edit them into the landing page) shortly thereafter?
@Jin I just noticed in the pdf. In that question the direction is off in the title. The word עבדים should appear more to the right of the word היינו with the ellipsis all the way on the left.
Also, just to clarify, in the TOC the black words Hebrew / English that aren't linked are referring to sections of the seder. The section Maggid is long enough and question-ful enough that we subdivided it.
... For Magid, to keep things simple, I think I'll just have one H1 for Magid, followed immediately by another H1 for the first sub-section. They'll show up on the TOC at the same level, on the same page. Alternatively, I could just have one H1 (and one TOC entry) for Magid, and then use H2, but colored black, for the subsection/quotations, followed by regular, orange H2s for question titles. ...
... Third alternative: Make H3 identical to H2 now, make H2 like it is now, but black, use H1 for sections, H2 for Magid sub-sections, and H3 for question titles, and set the TOC to grab H1 and H2.
@DoubleAA If anyone can play around with the Hebrew and English in the Word doc and provide advice on getting it right with minimal steps after Ctrl-V, I'd appreciate it.
@DoubleAA that's fine. sorry I misunderstood. The TOC updates dynamically(although you have to right click on the TOC section to choose update new question titles and page numbers).
@IsaacMoses you can email it to me jin @ stackexchange.com. although right now we don't host files off our server. The best and easiest way would be for you to put it in a dropbox folder and share the link to file only.
@IsaacMoses I think the best way to get this done is, once you're done with final text edits, email the word doc back to me at jin @ stackexchange.com and i'll do some final design changes(visual only), and email the doc back to you and convert it to 2 PDFs
@IsaacMoses another way would be, adjust margin to the longer/wider version of the page size, so the content section size remains the same.
@IsaacMoses to be honest I haven't done this two size thing in Word before. In fact, it's been years since I used Word that's why I struggled a bit with it last night.
@DoubleAA and @Jin, I'm wondering if the titles that are in Hebrew and translated into English (like "...עבדים היינו " / "We Were Slaves..." should be one on top of the other, not side by side.
@IsaacMoses I think the logo as first may be more visually pleasing. followed by Hebrew, then English. That way the top of the page feels airy and open.
@IsaacMoses Not objecting here, just wondering if it's a bit of overkill? The Hebrew words מי יודע are in the graphic. You know I love Hebrew; I'm just wondering about its appeal to, say, @Jin, whose Hebrew background isn't as strong. ;-)
@Jin RTL still causing problems. Hopefully someone (@msh210) will provide advice for that some time today. Should the title text maybe be in a different color than the text in the logo (tree-brown)? (What are the RGB numbers for tree-brown?) Also, should the titles perhaps be above the logo, to separate them from the (larger) text in the logo? As far as the doc is concerned, its title is more important.
@DoubleAA Perhaps. If you can recommend a font, we can try it. One issue is that fewer people can read Rashi script than can read standard Hebrew block letters, and we're (I think) trying for broad reach with this volume.
@SethJ Actually, I don't think I addressed this above. Answer: maybe yes. I'll see how it looks/works. If they can fit on the same line centered (or with the space between them at center) (or maybe even left-justified), without slash or quotation marks, that may actually look nice. I may shorten some specifically so they can fit on one line
@DoubleAA My father, for example, only uses Artscroll for Bentching because fancier Bentchers tend to have slight distortions in the letters for artistic purposes, and he struggles to read them. (cc @IsaacMoses). It depends on how easy you're trying to make it for people.
@DoubleAA Thanks. Can't access LJ now, but I trust it'll be straightforward enough to get the font tonight. I hope it survives the translation to PDF without trouble.
@Jin I thought we were aiming for a "page area" that would work on either A4 or letter without having to tweak the content. The PDF last night looked like it would print fine on either (though I can't test with A4). Do we need to worry about page numbers changing, widows/orphans, etc?
@SethJ You've got to check this out. They have different fonts for ancient Hebrew as used in qumran, vs the mesha stele, vs gezer, vs the samaritans etc.
@MonicaCellio page# is automatically updated once you refresh the TOC. I suspect there may be cases where we have to tweak the widows/orphans manually.
@MonicaCellio In pdf, I think the pagination is fixed. It'd be nice if someone could test the test PDF Jin already made in an A4 environment to see if what comes out looks reasonable. If so, we'll just publish one PDF and shalom al Yisrael
@IsaacMoses I think having the lone use of Rashi script being on our cover page would be odd. And as you said, not everybody knows how to read it, and I hope that some of the people we're reaching with this are in that group. As @SethJ said, first impressions matter.
@IsaacMoses :-)
@Jin, thank you so much for all your work on this! I can't wait to share this with people!
@MonicaCellio Good points. I agree wholeheartedly that I hope this document gets used by a wide cross-section of people, including those who can't read Hebrew at all.
@IsaacMoses and @MonicaCellio, right, so the question is, are we assuming that Rashi font won't turn off readers since there's a preponderance of English and standard Hebrew font?
@SethJ I'm assuming that Rashi script on the front page could deter the less-fluent folks from turning to the second page. I'd rather just stick with standard Hebrew; even if they can't read that either, they'll probably recognize "haggadah" since they see it elsewhere, and "mi yodeya" is translated below the logo.
@IsaacMoses yeah, right, sorry! Of course. Need to install more caffeine today, apparently. :-) They should know those words from the song, and if not "haggadah" will still be obvious. So long as it's not in Rashi script. :-)
@IsaacMoses @MonicaCellio @msh210 and others, i put up a template MS Word file here. I also included a PDF version so you know how it'd look as it is on my computer (in case your version of Word formats differently).
It's from Jin's PDF.
> Why do we link Shabbat with the Exodus from Egypt?
Also, there's quite a few double hyphens which really should be dashes.
(This is especially annoying when the double hyphen breaks on a linebreak, as it does in Alex's answer to that same question.)
Contributers list for that same question: Barry's name is followed by a double hyphen before the URL. All the others have but a single hyphen. (I'd say a colon would be better, but consistency is what really matters.)
Why do we link Shabbat with the Exodus from Egypt?
Isaac Moses's four-year-old son asked:
Why do you say "Mitzrayim" in Kiddush every week? "Mitzrayim" is a Pesach word!
Isaac Moses elaborated:
In other words, why do we refer to Shabbat as "commemorating the Exodus from Egypt"? Isn't it really...
@MonicaCellio No it's correct in the original. Must be a transcription error.
@MonicaCellio Should be easy enough to fix with find/replace
@DoubleAA Probably had to do with adjusting the formatting there (there's some bold). @TRiG, thanks for the proofreading. When we do the copy/paste for real, we'll make sure these issues are not present.
@MonicaCellio My home computer is playing up (refusing to turn on), and I promised myself I'd leave the office on time today for a change, so probably not.
Ohh... I see. That PDF also has all Hebrew multi-word phrases with the words in reverse order. Okay: is that extant? If so, I don't know what to do about it! (Sounds like a MS-Word-specific issue, and I don't know Word.)
@msh210 that was my fault most likely. it's both good and bad when copying from website then pasting into Word, that Word tries to help you to maintain the text styling from the site..
hyperlinks are a pain. because i had to manually strip out the link, and reformat the text color
what I ended up doing was, pasting into Notepad/Textedit first, the convert to pure text format, then copy 'n paste again into Word.
@msh210 It looks like in most cases, I can copy/paste mixed text from MY into Word, and the Hebrew comes out OK.
@Jin Found it. (Create hyperlink. Put cursor in it. Open Styles list. Select Hyperlink style. Modify. All hyperlinks remain clickable but look like regular text)
I think that I'll be able to copy formatted text out of MY, drop it in Word, and fix most style issues with global changes to styles.
@msh210, your thoughts related to thesetwo comment blocks would be appreciated
@IsaacMoses another thing you could do for magid is to collapse it down to one heading -- magid - dayeinu" (with the Hebrew), instead of "magid" h1 + "dayeinu" h2.
@msh210 with the number of questions we have this year it doesn't seem necessary, so we can leave it to editor's (Isaac's) discretion when he actually sees the pages before his eyes.
@msh210 H1: Big, orange, with box around it. H2: Medium, orange, with no box
@msh210 If I put sections as H1 and subsections as H2, it's possible to configure the TOC to indent the subsections. I don't intend to let Q titles be on the TOC; only sections and maybe subsections
Apropos of nothing... we have a new employee in my office, who I spent some time chatting with yesterday. He wears a kippah. Finally, I will not be the only person in this office who keeps kosher, won't work on Shabbat, etc! I spent years feeling so alone, with the occasional "but he does..." questions/challenges when I needed to (e.g.) leave early for yom tov... (He just moved to my neighborhood, so I was helping with the local "what's where" stuff.)
@MonicaCellio Until very recently, I was the only employee of my company (which has a couple thousand) that I've met that I've even suspected was Jewish, let alone observant. I'm sure he's happy to know you're there, too!
@IsaacMoses yeah, we have several secular Jews (in an office of ~120; the company is bigger but I don't meet many who aren't from here). And now we each have a buddy, so to speak. :-)