Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 6.026 July 2, 1996 1) Avraham Burg entfert (Refoyl Finkel) 2) _Tam-Tam_ (Khayem Bochner) 3) _Tam-Tam_ (Pierre Lewis) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 09:35:13 -0400 (EDT) From: raphael@cs.uky.edu Subject: Avraham Burg entfert ikh hob geshikt a blitsbrivl avraham burgn benegeye vi er firt zikh mit yidish in yisroel. ot iz zayn entfer. Thank you for your e-mail regarding Yiddish and the World Zionist Organization. The WZO has, for many years been a tremendous supporter, both morally and financially, of the World Council for Yiddish by providing them with office space, electricity and services at absolutely no charge. This is a significant point that has been omitted from most "open letters" and other publications relating to the subject. The World Council for Yiddish was given ample notice in order to find alternative office space and to make their arrangements. Regarding the allocation to the Council-the Council will no longer be receiving an automatic allocation, but it is certainly welcome to apply for WZO funding just like any other public body. Sincerely, Avraham Burg Chairman of the Executive Office of the Chairman Refoyl Finkel 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 02 Jul 96 09:53:05 -0400 From: bochner@deas.harvard.edu Subject: _Tam-tam_ A hartsikn yasher-koyekh di aroysgebers fun Tam-Tam!! U, va, s'iz sheyn! Since there have been a couple of complaints about their use of pdf format, let me comment briefly. Adobe Acrobat (the program that reads and displays pdf format) is available for free on all major platforms. (Yes, unix too, if you're using X windows. And if you aren't using X, how are you going to display Hebrew characters?) And using this format we get to see an exact duplicate of the beautifully laid-out printed version. If there's another platform independent, freely available format that can duplicate these results, I'd like to hear about it. Now that I've seen it, my problem is figuring out how to send a money-order in francs so I can subscribe. Even if it's available for free on the Net, I want to subscribe to give them the financial support. A couple of technical tips: it's laid out for paper that's larger than American 8.5x11, probably A4 size. So if you just print it, you lose the bottom lines of each page. In Acrobat it's easy to tell it to scale it down to 90% when printing, and that way it prints nicely on American paper. And be careful if you're using a Mac, _and_ you have the Hebrew Language Kit installed. Unfortunately the HLK interferes with the way that Acrobat tries to display the Hebrew characters, producing garbled output (and running very slowly besides). If you disable WorldScript using the Extension Manager, and restart your Mac, Acrobat should be able to display the file nicely. (If there's a way to deal with this without rebooting the Mac, I'd like to hear about it.) Finally, the first of the three issues currently on-line doesn't seem to down-load correctly, at least on Unix. Maybe they'll be able to fix this, but in the meantime, start with the second and third issues. Khayem Bochner 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 13:08:00 -0400 From: lew@nortel.ca Subject: _Tam-Tam_ Excepting Mendele of course, this has got to be one of the most interesting Yiddish I've seen on the net so far. And on the Web to boot. They chose PDF which some have questioned. PDF is available for Windows, for MACs, and for four Unices (Sun, HP, SGI, AIX). That certainly still leaves some folks out, but is not quite as bad as Windows only... PDF is huge, granted, but the files are quite a bit more compact than the other alternatives I know of (postscript, and, for the same quality, GIFs). Once HTML really supports R2L scripts and non latin characters, and once browsers than can do same are widespread, and once fonts are available without much trouble, then HTML should be a *much* better medium. I don't see that happening for some time yet. With PDF, I didn't have to load any fonts from anywhere, it just worked first time (I had previously installed acroread of course, but hadn't used it for anything but English so far). It works because PDF carries the fonts within itself (which explains the file size). It also obviously deals with R2L, but I know not how. And the print quality is just great. With respect to using transliteration instead, well, I can certainly read transliteration with much less effort, but how could I object to using Yiddish letters (on Mendele or elsewhere)? After all, proficiency in reading Yiddish the way it has been printed for 1000 years is certainly valuable and worth a bit of effort. It's the one thing I really miss on Mendele: real oysyes. And could a Yiddish periodical get away ("politically") with publishing in Latin letters? That's fine for us Mendelyaner, given all the technical problems, but for a publication? Pierre Lewis Montreal ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 6.026 Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a meaningful Subject: line 2. Sign your article (full name please) Send articles to: mendele@yalevm.cis.yale.edu Send change-of-status messages to: listserv@yalevm.cis.yale.edu a. For a temporary stop: set mendele nomail b. To resume delivery: set mendele mail c. To subscribe: sub mendele first_name last_name d. To unsubscribe kholile: unsub mendele Other business: nmiller@mail.trincoll.edu ****Getting back issues**** 1. Anonymous ftp archives are available. ftp ftp.mendele.trincoll.edu in the directory pub/mendele/files A table of contents is also available, along with weekly updates. 2. Mendele archives can also be reached as follows: via WWW: http://sunsite.unc.edu/yiddish/mewais.html via gopher: gopher://sunsite.unc.edu/11/../.pub/academic/languages/yiddish/mendele via ftp: ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/academic/languages/yiddish/mendele