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Alternative to Trope Trainer for printing large-print torah portions with trope and vowels?
I sometimes help other people in my synagogue learn to read torah. While I have a tikkun, I have some vision problems and find it much easier to print a portion from Trope Trainer, which offers a large-print option. (I'm usually working with one Shabbat aliyah at a time.)
Well, I did. Unfortunately, Trope Trainer has stopped working and the company that made it has gone out of business, so it's unlikely to be fixed. I am looking for a source of easy-to-read text with vowels and trope marks (the right-hand column, in other words) that I can print at a font size of my choosing. I found a site that produces images, but not very legible ones (and images are harder to work with). Mechon Mamre has Hebrew with trope marks but it's in a two-column format and I can't see a way to cut/paste just the column I want. On Sefaria I can find the portion, select Hebrew-only, copy and paste into Pages,[1] and increase the font size and right-justify, but some of the marks are hard to read -- I think sometimes vowels and tropes are overlapping, maybe. (Example.)
How can I print clear, large-font text of an aliyah with trope and vowels?
I'd also welcome a solution that bypasses the problem with Trope Trainer, but I assume that's a much harder problem. It's trying to check for updates, failing, and then crashing. I don't know if there's a way to disable the check for updates from outside; since the software won't open I can't look for a preference thee usual way. That might be a question for Power Users.
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Mac answer to Word. I don't own Word or DavkaWriter. ↩︎
4 answers
I take it you want good copy/paste text of the portion with niqqud and ta'amim? If I've got that right ;) then I could suggest tanach.us - for example, follow this link for Ki Tavo. (Sometimes I have to hit the Enter key twice to get the URL to be recognized by the browser. Odd.)
Its interface takes a little getting used to, but what to display and how, font size (even font!), etc., can all be configured by the user from the set of drop-down menus in the upper right corner.
This, for example, is copy/paste of the verse you used as an example in your answer:
אָר֕וּר שֹׁכֵ֖ב עִם־כָּל־בְּהֵמָ֑ה וְאָמַ֥ר כָּל־הָעָ֖ם אָמֵֽן׃ ס
The default is to include ktiv and qere, although it can be set to show qere only. Similarly, the conventional chapter/verse notations are shown, though they likewise can be removed. Etc., etc.!
Here's a screenshot (no user settings applied - just font size):
I always use the SBL Hebrew font, but there are some other excellent other options provided by the Culmus Project. They have fonts with ta'amim for most of the "common" font styles out there, and a couple based on the Aleppo Codex that are quite appealing.
Check out mercava.com. From there you can copy parts of the text, and you should see a black rectangle pop up. Click on copy both (doing just Hebrew does not include the nekudos) and paste it wherever you need. You can then delete the translation and make the text bigger.
It can look something like this:
(after making columns, size change, etc.)
I've learned two things since asking this question:
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Trope Trainer still works if disconnected from the Internet at launch time (a bit of a hassle, but it's a workaround -- h/t Power Users).
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The rendering problem I'm having with the pasted text is some problem in Pages, but Google Docs works better (h/t my rabbi).
Cutting/pasting from Sefaria into Google Docs is not exactly error-free, though:
1 comment thread
Do you have anything capable of running Davka Writer with Davka dimensions?
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