SSCN Voumes 1-10, 1994-2004

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter

Muqaffa‘ and Sai‘d ibn al-Batriq. Besides the books that he dedicated to refute the Jews, the Melkites and the Nestorians; he also wrote a book

about the differences of the sects. In almost all of his writings he expounded the faith, traditions, and teachings of his own church.

Computers and Coptic Studies (by Hany N. Takla)

I. Introduction: Standard recording of the heritage of the Copts was a primary concern for the Society since it was founded. The use of computers was a natural selection for such purpose. The early function required from such a medium was word- processing, especially in Coptic characters. The role of the computers then expanded to include computer publishing of such texts, text analysis, databases, and graphics. In pursuit of such goals the Society adopted different methods for the varying tasks required. II. History: 1. Early Attempts: In 1983, the Society developed a Coptic font using a simple Atari 800 PC system. This gave us the opportunity to superimpose these characters on a commercial Word-processing Program (Atari Writer). This system allowed us to write, view, and store Coptic text in the Coptic script. This was done by substituting the Coptic Characters for the lower case English characters and some other seldom used ASCII characters. The Upper Case characters were kept to allow us to write in both scripts at the same time. No accent marks, superlineal strokes, or abbreviations were possible under this arrangement. Printing of such hybrid character set was achieved using a 9-pin, dot-matrix printer that accepts downloadable fonts. A printer font was developed and was downloaded every time the printer was turned on. This crude system was used in publishing Coptic Lessons as well as computerization of some biblical and hagiographic texts. Mr. Edward Marshall of the Los Angeles Area was a great asset in the development of the system described above.

2. PC-DOS Work: In 1987, the Society adopted the IBM PC system as its standard computer system. This happened after we learned about a word-processing program that can do multiple languages; and has the capability of adding other character sets. This DOS-based program was called multilingual Scholar (MLS), developed by Gamma Productions Inc. of Santa Monica , California. It came packaged with English, Greek, Hebrew, Russian, and Arabic Scripts. Mr. Isaac Gindi of Los Angeles was the early developer of the Coptic Fonts for use with MLS that year. The Society worked with Mr. Gindi and Father Antonious Henein of Los Angeles to do minor modification of the shapes and keyboard assignment of some of the characters. Further, we acted as a distributor for several years for that product to spread the use of Coptic in word-processing. From 1987 to 1992, the Society inputted the entire New Testament and much of the Old Testament in both Bohairic and Sahidic in that format. Also we inputted many Hagiographic and literary Coptic texts. The circle of users was still limited and the primary mode of distributing the text was in print. 3. PC-Windows work 1992-94: In 1992, Dr. Wisam Michael of Los Angeles with the assistance of Fr. Antonious Henein developed three True Type Coptic fonts to work on PC-Windows 3.1 Environment. These were called the Antonious Fonts. The first was the normal Coptic Script, the second was the same characters with an added accent mark or Jinkim, and the third was like the second except for having the superlineal stroke instead. This development made it possible to use any Windows program for Coptic writing. The Society quickly adopted these fonts as the standard

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter

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