[Fwd: [sword-devel] STEP modules]

[Troy A. Griffitts]

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This was an answer from Kevin (who's not subscribed to the list)...
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Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 00:59:27 -0600
From: Kevin Brannen <kbrannen@gte.net>
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Subject: Re: [sword-devel] STEP modules
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"Troy A. Griffitts" wrote:
> 
> Steve, Kevin, and anyone else interested,
> 
>         There is a simple utility: stepdump that I just committed to cvs.  This
> should dump any STEP compatible module.  It is NOT Bible text specific
> so isn't everything we need for the STEPText module driver, but it is,
> at least, a start.

Thanks for the update.  I managed that as well, not too long ago.  It is a
very useful thing for testing.

...
> Steve, if you feel ambitious... :) and still want to help.  The really
> tough part of this project will be the RTF parsing (at least in my
> opinion).  SWORD handles different markups by providing real-time
> filters. ...

I can't answer how SWORD does/will do it, but yes, RTF is "interesting". (like
what in the world is "hidden-text" for? :-)  I'm presently in the middle of
doing RTF for myself and am having some success.  Now if I only had more
time... :-)  I've got about 25 RTF commands working, and have identified 34
more to do, plus 6 STEP commands to implement.

At this time, I think I will continue on my own; just so you know, as I said I
would get back to you about that.  However, I'll offer a hand by attempting to
answer any questions about STEP that I can (I have limited knowledge, but am
learning it the hard way. :-)  Also, while I realize I'm doing this in Perl
and not C++, I am willing to share any code you might like to see.  If you
feel like "borrowing", I'm willing to "lend".  I'll probably put a copy on my
web page soon.  If you care to be kept informed, let me know and I'll shoot an
email out; or I can email you a tarball of the code.

For the curious, I can tell you about book.dat, section.idx, viewable.idx; how
they work, how to use them, etc., if the STEP docs aren't clear.  I can
provide working code (again in Perl, but it's generally obvious how it works
as it's much like C/C++).  For those that have seen QuickVerse 6, I've got the
GUI up with the section index on the left, and the text reader on the right. 
If you click on a section entry, the reader will display the "text blocks" in
the reader:  raw (for debugging) and translated (the final output that is
getting better).  I've been working on "My Utmost for His Highest" as it's
reasonably short; but occassionally bring up a NASB or NKJV for fun.  I have
adopted a scheme of reading a whole book into memory at once and displaying
that.  For the NT, it works reasonably well, but woe unto me if I pull up
Psalms! (I took ~1m15s to load & translate & display :-)  I thought I'd point
that out in case you do or are thinking of doing that.  I will probably have
to change my ways... (I can now see why QV6 does it only 1 chapter at a
time... Hmmm...maybe I should do 1 chapter at a time with a cache of 25 on a
LRU scheme?  but then some chapter breaks are bad and a person needs to see 2
chapters at once... decisions, decisions :-)

> 
> OR....  If you know anything about the Bible reference lookup indexing
> of a STEP Bible module, let's work together on that.

Do you mean how \steplink works?  I haven't gotten that far yet; but I believe
I remember reading about it in the docs (big help huh? :-).  I'll probably get
to that in a couple of weeks.  If you mean something else, let me know in
more/different detail and I'll try to answer.  (but if your question means
what I think it does, you'll need the bible-book-number to bible-book-name
table listed on pages 46-49 in the v1.1 STEP doc)

Kevin

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