Unfortunately, I neglected to learn Hebrew in my youth, so it wasn’t until I compared this with a PDF that Ted sent me that I realized it was totally messed up. Obviously, the wrong font was being applied, so I selected the text, chose Adobe Hebrew (an OpenType font which ships with InDesign, I believe), and set the paragraph to Right Aligned (because Hebrew is read right to left): I opened the HTML file in Safari, copied the text out, and pasted it into an InDesign text frame? where it showed up as pink rectangles: So Ted would write in his Hebrew word processor, save it as an HTML file, and send that to me. But then someone suggested we copy and paste from a Web browser, and believe it or not, it worked!
Similarly, copy and paste from a word processor didn’t work.
The text got messed up, the fonts were a disaster? we could not get it to work. My co-author sent me various files with Hebrew in them and I tried to place them into my American version of InDesign. With the help of InDesign and a great plug-in, we were able to accomplish the task easily. Plus, we were able to add some stuff that had to be cut from the first edition, and add one whole new chapter.īut this blog post isn’t about the book it’s about the Hebrew in the book! We didn’t include a lot of Hebrew - mostly just blessings in one appendix.
We found the idea rather funny after all, what has changed in Judaism in the past 12 years? But it turns out that with the help of a terrific editor we were able to make a much cleaner, clearer book. I like to point out that this is one book where I’m really The Dummy!Īnyway, last year the publisher asked us to work on a second edition. As you may know, I’m the author or co-author of several other books, including Judaism For Dummies (with Rabbi Ted Falcon).
I’m feeling grateful and wanted to share it with the world.