המלצות

Professor of Talmud, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

I have recently finished working with Raphael Freeman of Renana Typesetting on an extremely complex typesetting project and I welcome this opportunity to publicly acknowledge the quality of his work and his participation in our collaborative effort. The book which I am about to publish is a collection of writings by Saadia Gaon in Judeo-Arabic, accompanied by translations into Hebrew, explanatory notes and prefaces. These texts are known almost exclusively from a variety of fragmentary manuscripts, and for most of the material there are overlapping manuscripts whose readings I have presented in the form of a critical apparatus keyed to line numbers. The presentation of the texts required a number of special typographical symbols as well as a line-numbering program; in addition, I was anxious to present the original texts opposite their translations on facing pages, which necessitated deciding on an individual basis how much material (original and translation, along with their accompanying variant readings and notes) to include in each opening.

Mr. Freeman demonstrated first-rate typesetting and design skills. He proved equally adept at finding and exploiting the most appropriate software for my specific purposes and at overcoming the inherent limitations of this software. I particularly appreciated his unfailing courtesy and perseverance in the face of demands which must often have seemed quite unreasonable if not impossible. I highly recommend Renana Typesetting for any typesetting project, including complex and challenging undertakings.