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. "Rashumon". amigafuture.de. Retrieved 2016-07-27.
2. "Rashumon - new student's version". Amiga Report International Online Magazine. Vol. 3 no. 9. 2 May 1995. Retrieved 2016-07-26.
3. "Multilingual Wordprocessing Systems". africa.upenn.edu. University of Pennsylvania - African Studies Center. Retrieved 2016-07-27.
4. Michael Haephrati (1993-07-08). "Amiga software that support Arabic". Newsgroup: soc.culture.arabic. Usenet: [email protected]. Retrieved 2016-07-27. now supports Arabic. Mr. John Hajjer of L.C.P.S. worked on the new set of Arabic, Syriac and Fersi 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. IDG Publishing. April 1993. p. 12.
7. Duarte, Timothy (September 1992). "New Products & Other Neat Stuff, Rashumon 1.2D". Amazing Computing. PiM Publications. p. 10.
8. Callegari, Luigi (June 1994). "News, Rashumon v2.3". Enigma Amiga Run (in Italian). No. 54. p. 12.
9. "A compilation of new hardwares and softwares for the Amiga". AmyNews. No. 3. 22 September 1994. Retrieved 2016-07-27.
10. Article about Rashumon at Amiga User International (UK)
11. Harari, Sams (November 1991). "Rashumon – a word processor that speaks for itself". 32 Bit (in Hebrew). p. 8.
12. Tal Shachaf (November 1991). "Amiga my friend". Maariv. Retrieved 13 September 2013.

External links

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