Digital Judaica Done Right

There are a few ongoing projects:

• digital edition of Rabbi Wichnin’s Chumash Questions book;
• archive documents of the arrests of the Alter Rebbe in 1798 and 1800;

Ideas (dating from 1991) for the dream environment for working with Jewish texts are the subject of two papers: general (HTML PDF EPUB) and typesetting-related (HTML PDF EPUB). Code implementing some of those ideas is in a GitHub repository.

SBL font is needed for viewing Tanach.

Calendar Paper

Paper on Rambam’s Laws of the Sanctification of the Moon:

• HTML
• PDF
• EPUB2

Goals of the paper:

• reconstruct models that Rambam uses and their parameters from the Rambam’s text;
• identify misprints in the traditional editions;
• see how Rambam’s calculations of the moon visibility compare to the current models.

Desire to publishing this paper in multiple formats was part of the motivation for writing Gradle DocBook plugin in general and its support for mathematics in DocBook in particular. It also influenced my thinking on publishing papers on the web.

Code that makes possible calculations with dates, time intervals and angles exactly as they are described by Rambam is available: Repository.