Friday, 20 September 2024

Obadiah - a technical experiment

I decided to chose a small book to see if the prose would lend itself to a verse by verse presentation of the music and the Hebrew hand signals in the text.

It is of course just fine, but I encountered a technological mess with the images. I thought I should find out about vector graphics instead of bit map graphics. What a tangle of confused compatibility between Word, Blogger, and Calibre. Word would not accept directly an image in SVG format. Epub accepts them and can convert them to Word. SVG images can be scaled without losing focus, i.e. without pixelation. Whatever I do, I like it to be easy. I might have time to physically place 2,500 images for the Psalms, but scarcely likely to be able to take on the other 20,000 individual verse images for the rest of the Bible. And technological compatibility is key to any efficiency, let alone control over the resulting number of files.

There are a lot of books and music to be developed as part of understanding and hearing these ancient voices.

Anyway, after painstakingly designing to a single, double, or triple line of music to produce a cropped image, I was able to get good formatting in the epub and it converted to Word with terrible decisions on fonts and sizes but was successful in converting the images. I won't pursue this any further, but here is Obadiah -- all 21 verses in a pdf form with reasonable reproduction. 

It is formatted as poetry in my old Jerusalem Bible, which after 50 years I am still using. But one really has to stretch to think of it as poetic. The message overall is a judgment against Edom. We met Edom in the music of the successions of Esau. The judgment is against him because he stood by and even was happy at the trouble his brother Jacob was in. It's difficult to read against today's warfare.

What can we make of Obadiah's music? 


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