Mishkan T'fillah (7)

[cellio]

Today's service with the draft siddur went very smoothly. We read less redundant English this time, which makes me happy, and did not run short of time like we did two weeks ago.

The addition for Rosh Chodesh is in there; it's a smaller font and somewhat grayed out, which caused me to just blip over it before. I would prefer that they not do both of those; either convention by itself conveys that this text isn't always done.

The formatting within the Rosh Chodesh part also needs work; it was hard to navigate. This is the same prayer you say for certain other days too, but with a few words changed in the middle -- so there's text, variable text, and then more text. Those variations are not adequately set off from each other and from the fixed paragraphs, so we stumbled over this. White space and bulleted lists would help a lot here.

In one place today (in the daily miracles) I found myself saying the correct words rather than the goofy translation when we read in English. This was unintentional, but now that it's happened I think I'm not motivated to change my behavior. I don't think either of the people sitting next to me noticed, so it's not disruptive.

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Comments

[goljerp]

I had a conversation after shabbat with a non-computer person about the way that various siddurim try to conserve space. Sim Shalom (1.x) deals with the Rosh Chodesh Musaf in a very poor way; this was emphasized to me and Joy this week partly because they neglected to announce the correct page in shul. (Basically there's half a page of italic instructions saying where to go for Musaf for Shabbat / Weekday / Rosh Chodesh / Festivals/ ???,) The Bokser siddur has a strange thing for Ma'ariv: I think that since the weekday Ma'ariv amidah is the same as, um, Shacharit(?), the text has various pointers to the same place. This means that Ma'ariv after shabbat involves a lot of skipping about in the prayer book. I was trying to use computer metaphors to explain this - lots of pointers to the same code - but realized what I was doing and stopped before becoming a total bore. I hope.