When I wrote my dissertation at Aberdeen with an IBM “golf-ball” typewriter, I was convinced that being able to type English, German, Greek, and Hebrew by juggling “balls” was the ultimate improvement. After Filipino colleagues at the Asia Theological Seminary in Manila challenged me in 1986 to switch to an XT computer, somebody mentioned Nota Bene as the  software that makes writing Hebrew and Greek both possible and easy. Steve Siebert had compassion on a potential customer living on a missionary salary in Asia, offered me a reduction in price, I bought the necessary Hercules Plus Card for displaying Greek and Hebrew, and the rest is history, as they say. Apart from emails, I have never used a different word processing software.

Nota Bene can make you feel guilty if you have written your dissertation accompanied by the trials of estimating the space footnotes take, leaving spaces for foreign language words, and compiling and retyping bibliographies. When you write a 1800-page manuscript with Nota Bene, it takes only a few seconds to create a 100-page bibliography, which is way too quick for former manual laborers.

I have written and produced three large camera-ready manuscripts with Nota Bene. There is nothing that publishers’ editors ask me to do that Nota Bene cannot do. When prompted to insert microspaces in certain places, I discovered that Nota Bene not only knew what that is but was able to perfom. Ibidem, which has grown to over 60,000 titles, with some duplicates, makes writing footnotes even more enjoyable that it already was. Orbis makes it possible, among many other things, to check and harmonize tricky spellings of geographical names in large manuscripts.

The fact that it was possible to switch to Version 10 in the middle of two projects as a member of the alpha and the beta family, without a single word lost and without formatting messed up, is no small feat in a multi-lingual publication with Akkadian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Greek, Latin, German, and English text (Russian titles in Cyrillic were written for another book). The power and the beauty of Nota Bene is a testimony to the programming skills of Steve Siebert and his team (which often seems to be as small as the “team” sitting at my desk), who remains marvelously accessible. The new version is a marvel to behold, and gives even old hands the sinking feeling that the program can do much more than we already do with it every day.