Rashumon

Rashumon was a multilingual graphical word processor developed for the Amiga computer by an Israel-based company called HarmonySoft (founded by Michael Haephrati in 1989)^[1] and was sold until after the demise of Commodore in 1994 (a lower-priced "student" version was released in 1995^[2]). Rashumon had particular support for Hebrew, Arabic^[3][4] and Russian as well as English, and it could send its text to speech synthesis in English.^[5]

Screenshot of Rashumon

Print sample created by Rashumon (an advertisement in the spirit of the Revolutions of 1989)

Rashumon's Table Generator

The ruler used to allow bi-directional text editing

Rashumon was the only word processor for the Amiga having the ability to create and edit multilingual documents.^{[6] [7]} Rashumon printed using Type 1 PostScript fonts^[8] and it also supported Intellifont.^[9]

Name

Rashumon was named after a Japanese movie which had four different characters giving different versions of the same event. Amiga User International commented that this name seemed appropriate for a wordprocessor designed to support multiple languages.^[10]

Notable features

• Discontinuous selections: the user can select multiple parts of the text – even if these parts are separated from each other – and perform clipboard manipulations on them (e.g. selecting the first paragraph and the last paragraph of a document at the same time, and copying both of them to the clipboard).^[11]
• A Table generator, allowing the creation and editing of tables.
• Multiple key map support, up to 5 simultaneously, allowing for the use of multiple languages simultaneously.
• Search and replace including color, style and font filters. For example, end users could search for the word "Apple" only in green (ignoring this word in other colors) and replace each occurrence with the word "Banana" in yellow.
• Multilingual string gadgets (the Amiga equivalent to text boxes) for creating and renaming files, drawers, etc.
• Import and export multilingual ASCII files to and from PC and Macintosh.^[12]
• Fast screen updating and scrolling.
• Interchange File Format (IFF) graphics support (import and export).
• Direct access to 255 characters of each font, similar to inserting "symbols" or "special characters" in modern wordprocessors.

References

1. Entry in Amigafuture (Germany)
2. Amiga Report entry
3. An article about the Arabic support added to Rashumon by University of Pennsylvania African Studies Center, quoting Tel-Aviv University Computation Center
4. Usenet announcement "now supports Arabic. Mr. John Hajjer of L.C.P.S. worked on the new set of Arabic, Syriac and Fersi (probably a typo of Farsi) fonts and keymaps."
5. A news article published by Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel, 1991 (Hebrew with translation into English)
6. "Write with a twist". Amiga World. April 1993. (see also scanned text of that issue)
7. "Rashumon DTP". Amazing Computing. September 1992.
8. An article about Rashumon at Enigma Amiga Run, volume 54 page 12, Italy (see also a scan) "Nuova versione di un noto, all'estere, word processor multilinguo dalla HarmonySoft (69 Jabotinsky St., Givatayim 53319, Israel). Si trtta di Rashumon ǘ.3, con pieno supporto a Postscript, comprese le font Adobe Type 1. Tra le altrc nuove caratteristiche un nuovo sistema di mappatura della tasticra multilingue, funzioni di manipolazione dei font e pieno supporto AGA."
9. "textfiles" – Amiga software products
10. Article about Rashumon at Amiga User International (UK)
11. A review by Sams Harari, editor of "32 Bit" Magazine, November 1991 (Hebrew, plus translation to English)
12. Tal Shachaf (November 1991). "Amiga my friend". Maariv. Retrieved 13 September 2013.

External links

• Rashumon versions at Aminet.net
• Rashumon's web site