This project aims to produce a free software toolkit for making high-quality custom Jewish liturgical books, such as haggadot, siddurim, and bentchers, that can be displayed on screen or printed to paper. The project's goals are to include a reliable source text, and to enable the user to customize the text for local rites and customs, and to selectively include multilingual translations, transliterations, instructions, notes and commentaries.

The project is at a very early development stage. The first project goal is to create a usable haggadah, with all of the software necessary to produce a PDF. If you are interested in helping with development, join the jewishliturgy-discuss Google group and/or fill out our survey form.

What it is

The project software consists of the following:

• An XML representation of the liturgical texts, translations, instructional notes, and commentaries. Texts are marked up by the form of their content.
• A schema (written in TEI ODD language) that describes the XML format. These files contains human-readable encoding documentation and a computer-readable schema can be compiled into well-known schema languages, such as DTD, XSD, or RelaxNG
• Scanned images or text documents containing the sources that are used in the siddur.
• A library to act as an interface between the XML and client applications.
• A set of scripts to convert the XML texts into printing format (PDF).
• A web-based XML, text, and metadata editing interface
• A web-based end-user application

All of these parts are currently under development.

Goals

The ultimate goal of the project is to create a software framework for generating custom Jewish liturgical texts, such as siddurim. For an end-user, the process may involve downloading our software or visiting a website that is running the software as a service. The user would then be given some basic options, such as the times the siddur should be valid (eg, weekdays only, Shabbat, High holidays), which rite (nusach) it should conform to, whether it should include commentaries, translations and/or transliterations. A user will also be allowed to tweak the default options to his/her own customs and needs by setting features based on sets of documented options. The software would then generate a custom book in the user's chosen format.

Getting Started

Current development progress is being tracked on our wiki at wiki.jewishliturgy.org. All useful documentation is kept on the wiki.

Comments and bug reports from anyone are welcome.

For an overview of the installation process, read the ReadMe page, which directs you to specific instructions. As of now, there are no released files in the downloads area. To get the code and texts, check out the source code via Subversion. (Note that this is very outdated and will soon be removed.)

The data repository is kept on our eXist database.

You may also experiment with a running instance of the development application.