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Category Archives: Open Siddur Project

Development Status (08/15/2010)

16-Aug-10

Hello friends, Check out our progress! This development status update chronicles progress on the Open Siddur made since our last update, February 15, 2010. If you’d like to get news of Open Siddur Project development as it occurs, make sure to follow @opensiddur at Twitter, or join the opensiddur-announce email list. We also recommend following [...]

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Unicode Compliant and Open Source Licensed Hebrew Fonts

23-Jul-10

Recently, Efraim and I tried our best to convert two documents (1, 2)  based on the work in Jewish liturgy by Dr. Avigdor Shinan and contributed to the Public Domain by the Avi Chai Foundation. They were unfortunately encoded with old (pre-Unicode) and proprietary Hebrew fonts made by Elsner+Flake. While we made some progress, ultimately, [...]

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Spirituality, as our hearts are stirred to create and contribute

27-May-10

Is spirituality important to a meaningful Jewish identity? If spirituality describes an intimate and evolving experience within and between individuals, then what might a meaningful resource look like that is both rooted in tradition and respects the integrity of personal and communal growth? Most Jews would say such a resource does not yet exist. The [...]

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A Historical Map of Jewish Liturgies

07-May-10

The Siddur is an aggregate of thousands of years of creatively inspired work. The organization of the material within any one particular siddur–the textual ingredients and arrangements –represents a specific lineage, or nusaḥ, with its own history of development. There are a good number of different lineages some of which are still alive and changing, [...]

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Culmus Project’s Ancient Semitic Scripts Fonts Now Licensed GPL with “font exception”

21-Mar-10

Think of a favorite book, or siddur, and think of the style of the letters in it. Fonts are used to forms the words and portray the liturgy, poetry, and other texts. More often than not, these fonts are not free. They are licensed from typographic designers for a fee or used with permission. Sometimes [...]

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Access, sharing, and innovation through digitization

14-Feb-10

Over at Darim Online‘s blog, Phillip Brodsky reflects on Apple’s release of the iPad and asks some leading questions concerning the future of the book with the “People of the Book”, similar to J.T. Waldman’s posts on JPS’ blog last June and July last year. Considering e-readers and e-book formats, Brodsky asks, How might the [...]

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An Economic Argument for Free Primary Data

09-Feb-10

There are two principles on which the success of data on the contemporary web rests: the web makes content available, and it adds value to that content by linking it to other related information. When considering bringing old content online, both of these aspects are important. A first level of digitization involves simply making data [...]

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Email list changes

08-Feb-10

In order to separate technical and non-technical discussion, the Open Siddur Project has changed the names and addresses of its discussion lists. The new lists are: opensiddur-announce: A read only list for project announcement postings opensiddur-talk: General discussion list (replaces jewishliturgy-discuss) opensiddur-tech: Technical discussion list opensiddur-dev: Commit messages and issue reports (replaces jewishliturgy-devel) The jewishliturgy-discuss [...]

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Welcome Jewish Week Readers!

13-Jan-10

Once again, the Open Siddur Project has been mentioned in the press, this time by Steve Lipman in the Jewish Week. The Open Siddur is a volunteer driven project to create a free resource for folks crafting their own siddur (Jewish prayer book). We intend to collaboratively build an archive of material that makes up [...]

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Architecture of the Open Siddur

18-Dec-09

Lead developer, Efraim Feinstein, recently contributed this helpful diagram of Open Siddur’s architecture.

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