Tools of the Trade

I have recently been playing around with Scapple. Scapple is somewhat of a simplified mind mapping program made by the same people behind Scrivener. Nice, simple, but quite useful. You might find a use for it.

Stefan Kottwitz, L^aT_eX: Beginner’s Guide. Packt Publishing, 2011.

If you have looked around this site, you know that one of the tools I use to write is L^aT_eX. Though it might not be everybody’s cup of tea, it does look like it is becoming more and more popular in the humanities. A sign of this increasing popularity is this new book published by Pack Publishing.

My favorite writing tool, Scrivener just got updated to version 2.0. As I have said several times, I use Scrivener (in combination with DevonThink) all the time.

When you need to transliterate Hebrew and Greek it’s not always obvious how to enter some of the more unusual signs. Here is a list of these signs from the transliteration recommended by the SBL Handbook of Style (p. 25–29). I am leaving out those that are easy to type (a for α, b for β, g for ג, etc).

Someone recently asked me whether it was better to get a Mac or a PC, which translated usually means stick with Windows or join the Mac crowd. Since it’s back to school time soon, this is a timely issue. But if you do research and write, the point is really not which one is better.

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.

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.