One more word on the subject...

From John Paul II, infallible, drooling leader of millions:

"Legal recognition of homosexual unions or placing them on the same level as marriage would mean not only the approval of deviant behaviour ... but would also obscure basic values which belong to the common inheritance of humanity."

His letter to the world also denounced gay couples adopting children: "Allowing children to be adopted by persons living in such unions would actually mean doing violence to these children."

Well, Johnny, maybe you got a point. I mean, your church sure knows a thing or two about doing violence to children!

Oooh, I'm in such an ass-kicking mood. I just totally bit someone's head off in gay_sex_tips, too. Hmm, I just realized that "ass-kicking mood" is actually the polar opposite of "kick-ass mood".

Late Night Tech Triumphs

I'm way behind with the book. I spent 6 hours of yesterday trying to figure out how to type Hebrew into Adobe Indesign. After browsing the net and finding some Hebrew fonts, I phoned an 800 number to confirm that they would do what I need and then biked to a Judaica shop and purchased the six megs of fontage for almost $100 with tax. I got it home and found out that they don't work. You can't type the vowels. This sounds funny to those who only know Western languages, but semitic languages have little dots, dashes and semiphore symbols all around them that act as vowels. This presents typesetting difficulties similar to those found in other multi-bit languages like Chinese.

I phoned back to the 800 number and was told that, sorry, they had been wrong, the package won't work for me. But I can buy the more expensive version and it will work. Oh, sorry, we're wrong: it won't. I put the 800 guy in touch with the NO REFUNDS store lady and they worked it out. I copied the fonts to my system anyway and returned the CD. Another software company told me they'd have a Hebrew word processor for OSX ready in a month. Too late. But they told me I should go ahead and restart in OS 9 and install the Hebrew support. I did this, though it wasn't much help. My goal was to get Hebrew text into Indesign in a post-script compatible way in OSX.

Then I found a shareware word-processor for X called Mellel which has bi-directional typing as well as an excellent "how-to" in the manual for working with Hebrew. Using the OS9 Hebrew fonts, I am now able to type in Hebrew in OSX. From then it's an, ahem, easy matter to save as PDF, open the PDF in Illustrator and then either cut and paste the text block into Indesign or else convert the text to outlines and save the Illustrator file as an eps which I can place in Indesign. Sheesh.

The Mellel site also had downloadable keyboard layouts including a QWERTY Hebrew keyboard which is faster for me to learn: the Hebrew letter that makes an "R" sound is on the "R" key. Now I'm achieving blistering speeds of 10 and 15 words a minute.

Woo (as they say) hoo.