yiddish-reader

A project aiming to create high-quality typeset printable Yiddish texts using the TeX typesetting engine and the ConTeXt macro package.

To compile on Linux:

• Install ConTeXt Standalone

• Copy the files in ./context-hack into context_dir/tex/texmf-context/tex/context/base/mkiv

• (optional) Create a shell script to set up the environment and compile. For example:

#/bin/bash

source ~/context/tex/setuptex

context reader --jobname=reader-letter --result=reader-letter  --purge
context reader --jobname=reader-book --result=reader-book --mode=book --purge
context reader --jobname=reader-ebook --result=reader-ebook --mode=ebook --purge

mv *.pdf ./output

Remember to replace context_dir with the directory where you installed ConTeXt Standalone.

Thanks to Hans Hagen and Wolfgang Schuster for the quick right-to-left fix. Hopefully it will soon be part of the standard distribution and all this setup won't be necessary.

Fonts

Fonts are included from Aharon Varady's repository for ease and convenience. Thanks to Aharon, Culmus Project, and Michal Sahar for the fonts.

The Texts

• Thanks to the Yiddish Book Center for scanning thousands of Yiddish books and supporting the Jochre project for Yiddish OCR!
• Thanks to Assaf Urieli for developing Jochre!
• Special thanks to Raphael Finkel for making OCR'd texts in Yiddish available before anyone else on the Internet!