LaTeX

Working with L^aT_eX involves writing in one application (TeXShop, TextMate, etc.) and viewing your document in a pdf reader (Acrobat Reader, Skim, etc.). To see the result of your work, to correct or improve it, it is often practical to quickly go back and forth between the working text and the resulting pdf.

From time to time, or often depending on your field of work, you might have to type textual criticism signs in you paper, thesis, masterpiece, and what not. Oftentimes the problem is finding the signs and then entering them into your document. There are several ways to find them: websites, the Character or the Glyph Palette of your system and sofware, etc. There also several ways to enter them, some more practical than others.

Recently, the Society of Biblical Literature made the new SBL Greek font available for free. This unicode font is designed by John Hudson, of Tiro Typeworks, who also designed the SBL Hebrew font.

This is what the font looks like (picture from the SBL site).

The font contains 1341 signs, all you need to reproduce the text of the Greek New Testament or the Septuagint and the majority of the signs necessary for NT textual criticism. As this picture shows (displayed are default font, rare ligatures, variant 4, and variant 6, and samples of nomina sacra), the font offers variants of the thêta, rhô, the sigma as well as all you need to write nomina sacra.

Depending on the operating system and the sofware you use, entering right-to-left scripts can be a real problem. On the Mac it seems Word is not going to offer satisfying RtL anytime soon. Mellel is quite good with Hebrew but is weak or non-existent in tables, images, parallel columns, indexes, etc.

One of the advantages L^aT_eX offers is the possibility to work with ancient languages without too much trouble. Here are the basic instructions to use Biblical Hebrew in X_ƎT_eX (this works fine on a Mac with Leopard).

To write in Greek in X_ƎT_eX is actually quite simple, especially if you use a font that contains all the characters needed to write in English (or whichever languages you use) and in Greek (like Gentium, Cardo, etc.). To type in Greek. The following instructions are specific for the Mac. If you use X_ƎT_eX on Windows or LinuxLes you just need to adapt the commands for choosing fonts to your environment. These instructions also apply to working with Greek from other periods or other ancient or other non latin languages, provided you use the appropriate font.

One issue that usually comes up at some point for those who write and work in theology is which computer tools to use. Here are some tools that I use with links to their sites.

In the late seventies, tired of the poor typographical quality of many scientific documents, Donald Knuth, of Stanford University, invented T_eX (pronounced by some Tex, by other Tech with a Scottish or German tech), a free document preparation system to produce beautiful documents on any computer platform. In the eighties, Leslie Lamport developed L^aT_eX (pronounced by some Lay-Tex) to make the use of T_eX easier.