August 27, 2007

Minor Agreement of the Day

The work I'm doing right now is really drawing attention to Minor Agreements--places in a story where Matthew and Luke agree on a wording over against what Mark has. (They become problematic for the predominant theory that Luke was composed by copying some of Mark without any knowledge of Matthew.) Here's my favorite MA today:

Mark 12.8 Luke 20.15a Matt. 21.39
καὶ λαβόντες ἀπέκτειναν αὐτὸν καὶ ἐξέβαλον αὐτὸν ἔξω τοῦ ἀμπελῶνος. καὶ ἐκβαλόντες αὐτὸν ἔξω τοῦ ἀμπελῶνος ἀπέκτειναν. καὶ λαβόντες αὐτὸν ἐξέβαλον ἔξω τοῦ ἀμπελῶνος καὶ ἀπέκτειναν.
So they seized him, killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard. So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him... So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.
I'm not really sure which I prefer, actually (Killing someone first and then throwing them out of my yard, or throwing them out of my yard and then killing them). Apparently, both Matthew and Luke independently preferred the latter rather than the former.

August 17, 2007

iWork and other WP's for biblical scholarship work

I continue to get mixed reports on some issues regarding Word Processors. For instance, Chris Heard tells me Right to Left Unicode Hebrew is working for him in iWork just as well as it does in TextEdit.

But I read other reports, such as a note from tom140 on a TidBits forum (Comment #13) reporting:

Another shortcoming is that iWork is full of bugs when working with RTL scripts like Hebrew/Arabic which were fixed in TextEdit years ago. But since Office can't do these scripts at all, this isn't such a problem.
I think I will soon put together a table of features for those of us interesting in writing on biblical studies and then have folks who use each package extensively to rate how the software holds up. I had planned on doing this after January when Word '08 comes out. I may not wait.

Update:
It'd be nice if Redlex updated their WP comparison table. But what I'm interested is information on comparing broad features, any one or two that could be deal breakers for a particular scholar's work. For instance, in how I work, scriptability is a must. Here's my list so far of features that are potential deal breakers for biblical scholars, ranked ever so generally in the order of how potentially important the feature may be to biblical scholars. Let me know your additions and suggestions for the list.

  • Intel version
  • Bibliographic software integration
  • Unicode RTL Handling
  • Scripting/Macro Integration
  • Cocoa application
  • Open/Save .doc
  • Open/Save Open XML doc format
  • Unicode Glyph Insertion Dialog
  • CPU usage in background
  • Customizeable keyboard shortcuts
  • Customizeable toolbars
  • Copy/Paste Style
  • Style Management
  • Find/Replace Style
  • Tracking Changes Feature
  • Find/Replace Ignore Diacritics
  • Outline View
  • TOC Generation
  • Cross Referencing Feature
  • Index Generation
  • Hideable Field Codes
  • Check Spelling by Language
  • Secondary Font Substitution Choice
  • Noncontiguous selection
  • Full screen mode
  • Split view
  • Text Flow Around Images/Objects

August 07, 2007

Apple's new iWorks 08... closer and closer

The newly released iWorks '08 is gaining in functionality. The addition of a spreadsheet program is fantastic.

I perused the documentation available so far for the word processor Pages and could find no reference to advancements in Unicode support, particularly pertaining to Right-to-Left Hebrew Unicode support. It is possible there could be improvements without it being a touted feature. But I doubt it.

Update: You can look at the tutorials here: www.apple.com/iwork/tutorials/

August 02, 2007

Office 2008 for Mac Delayed to til January

I see the news that Microsoft has postponed the release of the new Mac Office. I had been considering transitioning to Word '08 as I work on the dissertation. Looks like that timing won't work out.

August 01, 2007

Summer is ending according to Accordance

I'm back from summer travels... Canada, Haiti, Texas... whew. You can tell summer is ending because Accordance Bible Software has a back-to-school sale for August. Check out their News section of the web site for details.

Four bible versions for $80 is a sure bet.