Ketubah drafting part 3 – word processors

[hatam_soferet]

In an ideal situation, then, you have your .doc file, with the names and everything neatly filled in.

Next to the portable drafting board, the most awesome tool in the ketubah artist’s kit is – VARIABLE MARGINS!

Yes. You open your .doc file in Word*, and you mess with the margins. It’s great.

I’ve learned – it doesn’t take much fiddling about to learn with what fonts this trick applies to you – that with the aforementioned Broad nib, my usual ketubah script and Times New Roman’s Hebrew letters are spaced about the same. That is, if Word wraps Times New Roman text in a particular way, my writing is going to want to wrap at about the same point.

The other thing I’ve learned is that with a B nib, when I write the first line up to “alafim,” the line occupies 18cm. So in Word, I tweak the margin so that the first line wraps at “alafim,” and then all the other lines are wrapped for me! nice and neat! and I know that if I make all my lines 18cm wide, I won’t have any nasty surprises when things won’t fit.

Especially if you don’t fully-justify the text, you just right-justify it, so you can see which are the Short lines and which are the Long lines. Then you know which ones to stretch and which ones to squish so it’ll all look beautifully planned.

Then you say to Word, display line numbers please! and it shows you that there are 30-some lines (depending on precise text). So you know how many lines to write, as well.

* or proprietary or open-source equivalent, yes, blah, shut up, Word is the Kleenex of word-processors, generically ready to soak up tears and bogies whilst being challenged by cheap alternatives that will make your nose red. Um, what?

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.