A while back, I read a Ḥakirah article about Diagrams in Rashi’s commentary. And then, in a Gittin daf yomi shiur for Gittin 7b, I happened to glance at different gemaras, the diagrams they had, and how they differed.
So, we can start with the plain old Vilna Shas. Venice doesn’t have, but the Vilna does, for two different Rashis. First, how a strip goes out from Acco to the north until it reaches Keziv:
and the second is about Rav Pappa’s statement about east of the mesilah:
I noticed that in the print Artscroll, they had redone these Rashi illustrastions to make them crisper, with sharper closed lines. I don’t have an image.
But, in my Artscroll app, running on Androis, here are the two images, which are still different from the printed Artscroll:
and then, even though they had these other Rashi diagrams, whose purpose was to reimagine the specific Rashi content, they were freer in the footnotes to put whatever diagrams they felt like.
These diagrams put North where we expect it, upward:
Meanwhile, I regularly use the old Hebrew Steinsaltz gemaras. He kept the Rashi diagrams, but they look slightly crisper.
The Steinsaltz Center used to have downloadable (but locked for printing) PDFs for each day of daf yomi, but they recently created a new and improved Portal, where these are PDFs are no longer available, just the sampler of the first five pages for a masechet.
This is me kvetching: I must admit that I liked the Hebrew PDFs more. It had its own tzurat hadaf, where it was natural to quickly move your eyes from the central gemara column to this or that commentary, or to the further margins or bottom of the page for notes of various sorts. Internet portals provide for a different learning experience. Sure, React or Bootstrap will format and rearrange the content nicely on the screen, but it doesn’t match the concrete book-reading experience, especially for something like Talmud.
The portal does not (yet?) include any of Rav Steinsaltz’s own diagrams. However, under Rashi, they do include the Rashi diagrams. As you can see, they take the old Vilna Rashi diagrams.
