[osis-core] OSIS documents -- status report

[Harry Plantinga]

Update on our work on this end:

I am working with two students -- Luke Baker and Jon
VanHofwegen -- to prepare more than 300 MB of OSIS
1.1 documents. These students have worked full time
all summer long. The documents are being converted to 
ThML, and they will be transformed by XSLT to OSIS. 
We've got about 40 docs in the cocoon publishing system 
so far, with about 100 waiting on the wings to be 
finalized and put into the system, hopefully by August 31.
This is counting some multi-volume works such as Matthew
Henry's commentary as one document.

We are also preparing configuration files for editing
OSIS in XMetaL -- mainly a form for entering <header>
information so far.  We'll put up a web page where you 
can download them. (We've found that XMetaL works pretty
well.  It's slow and early in the development cycle, but
usable. It will be interesting to see what happens to it
now that the company has been bought by Corel.)

We are also preparing XSLT stylesheets for converting
ThML to OSIS and for converting OSIS to HTML and to FO. 
The hope is that you will be able to load the OSIS document
in your web browser and see a nicely formatted version, 
convert it to HTML, and convert it to PDF. We will be 
storing the XML and the CSS formatting in separate files; 
these will be combined with an XSLT file used for all books 
to view in a web browser. 

We are of course going to be working mainly with the 
features of OSIS used in our application; parts of OSIS 
that we don't use won't get much development time. The
software will no doubt be incomplete for different 
applications, especially markup and conversion of bibles.
But it's a start.

-Harry