SSCN Voumes 1-10, 1994-2004

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter

j. Testing, k. Preparation of the Master Copy, including all necessary inserts, l. Production and distribution. The work began slowly in the second half of 1999. The enormity of the project unfolded as time went one. The timeline of one year to perform the above tasks proved to be too optimistic. Challenges Faced: There is no worthy cause attempted without its share of challenges. This definitely was no exception. Such challenges were not only in the magnitude of the work but extended to the scarcity of qualified people to work on. We were faced with tasks that hould be performed by a clerical staff that possesses knowledge extensively above that found in such group. In other words, what was needed was starving students with a great deal of knowledge about the subject, time to spare, and willingness to work for minimum wages. We all know that people like that are rarely found, if ever found. The result was more and more work done by less and less people, taking longer and longer time than anticipated to produce a work that is worthy of being called the Coptic Encyclopedia. Technically, we were faced with a collection of text files that resembled an archeological dig than a word-processing task. It is still puzzling why they were grouped in the way they were. In any case, a database was developed to track where every thing is before a article file can be given to someone to format it. This however was not as challenging as the formatting task. The more than thirteen centuries of Arabic language penetration of the Coptic Heritage yielded an enormous amount of non-standard phonetic symbols used in transcribing such names and terms. Even with the simplification approach used, the task was still of a staggering proportion. This only applied to the first seven volumes. Volume 8 had its own challenges. First, the publisher never had an ASCII file version of it, so it had to be retyped. Second, the simplification scheme followed in the first seven volumes, was

clause was included, granting the publisher a percent-based royalty. The agreement was signed in the first quarter of 1999. The Early Preparation Stage: SMF has kindly involved the St. Shenouda the Archimandrite Coptic Society (SSACS) in the negotiations with the publisher since the beginning stages. Informally, SSACS agreed to assume the technical aspects of this project. As a result the following parameters were agreed upon by both organizations: a. The electronic edition will assume the form of a CD-Rom. b. The text and illustrations will be in Adobe PDF format, fully searchable by the search engine provided by the Adobe Acrobat Reader Software. c. The edition will assume a single column format which is better suited for viewing. d. All foreign language characters will be included. Hany N. Takla, the president of SSACS was selected as the project director. The project plan drafted, included the following: a. Electronic scanning of the hundreds of illustrations that these eight volumes contained, b. Converting of the most challenging volume 8 into electronic format, c. Establishing a master list of Articles included in this work. d. Surveying of the ASCII version of the articles of the seven volumes, submitted by the publisher, e. Arranging of the text of each article in a separate file, f. Designing a formatting template to be used in preparing the final version of the text, g. Converting the final version of an article text into Adobe PDF Format, h. Arranging the PDF version of each article into a single file per volume, i. Creating the navigational links within the text of these PDF documents,

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter

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