Dagesh Pro Wordprocessing & Publishing (Windows)

Judy Siegel-Itzkovich (1/1/1999) wrote:
Rating: ***** 5 stars out of 5

If Windows is the heart of a personal computer, without which it cant function, a high-level word processing program is the brain. Having a cheap, basic word processor is fine for the minority of computers used only for games; but if you want to produce professional-looking letters and reports, there is no substitute for a quality word processor.

Most of the world uses the excellent Microsoft Word, which costs nearly $300; if you want to type in Hebrew, however, you must add Microsofts special Hebrew edition of Word. And if you want to insert text in a few dozen other languages, from Arabic to Croatian to Russian, you cant.

Dagesh 2000 (its name in Israel, or Dagesh Pro, its marketing name abroad) is an outstanding improvement on Dageshs four previous editions, the first of which was released in 1992. The current version, produced by the new owners - GalTech Soft Ltd. in the Har Hotzvim Industrial Zone - is completely new, even though it was built on the experience gained from all the previous versions.

According to TES president Emanuel Fishman, Dagesh is currently the most used piece of software by Jews in the Diaspora, with more than 300,000 installed programs of the previous versions in use around the world. In the Diaspora, well over 80% of the schools use Dagesh daily. Since the new version came out about two months ago, 4,000 copies have already been sold.

The program is bundled with a Jewish clip-art collection of some 400 items - including biblical maps and birthday and holiday crowns you can print out for assembly; I was amused to see, under the Kibbutz category, a pair of bearskin-hatted Buckin-gham Palace guardsmen, along with turkeys, sheep, and other animals. Soon, the Clipart disk will be upgraded to include some 1,000 pieces of Jewish graphics. This disk is shared by the full texts of the Jewish daily and Shabbat prayerbooks (Sephardi, Ashkenazi and Common versions), Ethics of the Fathers, Shabbat songs, and the entire Jewish Bible.

There is also a separate disk with an archive of some 400 full-color photos of Israel taken by Dagesh staffer David Shimshon. When you slip either of these two disks into your CD-ROM drive, you merely have to pull down an item from the menu bar to view the photos or graphics displayed group by group and insert any of them into your text, full-sized or cut down to a smaller image.

The fourth disk in the package is WordPoint, another useful Israeli piece of software that translates any word on which you rest your cursor (even from the Internet) into Hebrew, English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

But despite its Jewish look, Dagesh 2000/Pro has attracted an audience of Moslems and Christians as well. We received requests from Kuwait and Jordan as well, because of the Arabic, English, and even Hebrew. And Arabs who live in New York, for example - and get along well with the local Jews - are buying Dagesh too.

Diaspora Jewish communities that speak less-common languages are also enthusiastic.

Fishman received a letter recently from Peter Ambrose of Pragues Jewish Museum, which needed a word processor that could edit words or sentences in Hebrew and then integrate them into a Czech fluent text.

Ambrose requested something compatible with the Czech version of Windows 95 or 98, had a phonetic keyboard for Hebrew letters (such as A for alef and Q for kuf and X for tsadi), plus a function for copy visual to transport Hebrew text to other word processors or to QuarkXPress or a comparable graphic program working with Latin fonts; copy visual allows you to type up a file and import it into most graphics programs, such as Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator, and then format the text to fit around photos and images.

The TES president was able to tell Ambrose: Its already on sale; just order it.

The Dagesh 2000/Pro package sold here comes with a clearly written instruction manual, Hebrew at one end of the book and English at the other. The program marketed abroad comes with a 132-page English-language manual. In any case, there is a very good on-disk help menu if youre the type who doesnt like to read printed instruction booklets and prefers to look up specific topics electronically.

The basic Dagesh 2000/Pro word processor has a new graphic interface that will feel very comfortable to the person familiar with Microsoft Word, as the toolbars are almost identical. Click a green-and-blue globe and you can turn the menu bar from English to Hebrew and vice versa.

There are spellcheckers and dictionaries for seven of the 49 languages. When you write text in Hebrew, you can use the AutoNikud feature to add Hebrew vowels automatically. GalTech has also included a translation option that makes it possible to highlight words within a document using your mouse and choose from a vocabulary list that most closely represents the meaning of the selected text.

The disk includes more than 200 fonts, and you can easily see what they look like by placing the cursor on the name of each (you dont have to click on on the name to see the fonts one at a time). Footnotes can easily be produced in the right size and placed in the proper position. Click the mouse to see how the text looks before its printed; you can also zoom in and out of the text. The program is Internet ready; it opens and saves the HTML programming language so you can publish your text on the World Wide Web.

If your keyboard has only English or English/Hebrew keys but you want to type in Arabic, Dagesh 2000/Pro has onscreen keyboards you can peck with your mouse to write text in any of the other languages - including phonetic Hebrew. Youll have no difficulty producing text in languages that go from right to left (such as Hebrew and Arabic) and languages going left to right (most of the rest) on the same line or in the same paragraph.

Users can also produce bullets to make lists, basic graphic tables, and support for printing even and odd page numbers on both sides of the page. Text can be saved automatically every few minutes when you request it, and the number of words appears with the click of the mouse.

If you have previously produced documents written using earlier versions of Dagesh, upon installing Dagesh 2000/Pro, all of these will be saved with the new icon symbols - a brightly colored orange topped with two green leaves.

In any case, this fine piece of software, which will travel around the globe, gives additional meaning to the saying: Out of Zion goes forth the Torah.

Copyright (C) 1999 The Jerusalem Post



ORT/JECC Partnership for Technology (1/1/1999) wrote:
Dagesh is the established leader in Hebrew/English word processing and this latest upgrade maintains its position at the head of the pack. As you might expect of a major upgrade, there are many new features, plus lots of little enhancements that makes your work a little easier. This program comes with 200 Hebrew fonts, three CDs of photographs and clipart, and complete versions of the Tanakh and siddur. These are valuable add-ons from teachers who import texts and graphics into their documents. The best add-on, however, is the autonikud option. Highlight a word (or words) press a few buttons and you are offered a list of possible nikud options for the selected text. Choose one of the options and the program automatically inserts the nikud in place. Seasoned Word users will find no difficulty orienting themselves to this program because the toolbars options are exactly the same as those found in Word. Dagesh can easily and accurately import files from Word, but not files from DavkaWriter. The programmers have also included a new “save as html” option for those who want to publish their work on the World Wide Web. Minor nuisances and improvements need to be addressed. The Tables option does not allow the user to modify individual cells within a table. This is frustrating for those who are used to the precision of Word. Also, the new HTML conversion option has a minor bug when converting documents with imported graphics. The company is working to repair this bug and will post a patch on their web site, as soon as it becomes available. The full program is expensive, but all in all, there is a lot to applaud here.

Minor nuisances and improvements need to be addressed. The Tables option does not allow the user to modify individual cells within a table. This is frustrating for those who are used to the precision of Word. Also, the new HTML conversion option has a minor bug when converting documents with imported graphics. The program automatically renames the graphics within the HTML code. In order to see the graphics, users need to edit the Dagesh generated HTML code to reflect the original graphic file name. A far more serious problem remains with printing. Originally, the program did not allow the user to view landscape mode properly. Part of the page was cut off. That bug was fixed with a patch made available on the TES site. However, the program still does not allow the user to switch between portrait and landscape mode for printing purposes in a single document (it views fine, but prints incorrectly). The company is working to repair this bug and will post a patch on their web site, as soon as it becomes available.