[sword-devel] Questions & Requests

[Chris Little]

> 1. Firstly, is there any documentation etc. for new/interested people
> to help get started?  (I have downloaded the API document, and,
> although I have only looked through it briefly, it doesn't seem to
> provide this.)

No there isn't.  I will do as much documentation as I can of this stuff
starting right this minute.  I will post docs to SourceForge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sword.

> 2. I have downloaded the prn2sword program and tried it out on
> a couple of modules I exported (in rtf format) from On-line Bible.
> Unfortunately, as soon as I tell it to start work it crashes.  Windows
> ME reports that "prn2sword has caused an error in KERNEL32.DLL..."
> Any ideas here?  (I am using the latest version of On-line Bible.)

I don't know why prn2sword would cause an error in kernel32.dll.  I'd be
willing to blame ME though, in this case. :)

There are a couple reasons why prn2sword isn't overly useful.  The first is
that I think all but 2 publicly available OLB modules are already in SWORD
format.  The other problem is that Larry Pierce changed the format of the
RTF output between OLB 8.0 and 8.1 so prn2sword doesn't recognize the output
properly.  I think if we can convince Troy to recompile prn2sword it should
work again.

> 3. I notice that Sword appears to be concentrating solely on directly
> Bible-related stuff.  On-line Bible and Theophilos also include
> a LOT of other material that I would very much like to see in
> Sword.  This includes things like the pseudopigrapha, early church
> fathers, creation science productions, and many others.  Is this
> a philosophical decision that has been made for the Sword project,
> or is it just something that hasn't yet been done?

I think this is mostly the latter.  We don't have any way of handling books
that are not keyed to Bible verses or to a word/number (a dictionary or
lexicon).  We've been discussing adding support for all the books that don't
fit into these categories, but work on this probably won't be started until
the various other open projects get finished up.

> 4. I will not actually be able to put a lot of time into this, but is
> there anything easy I can do to help?

I don't know if there are any ways to help Sword directly without making a
bit of a time commitment, aside from just testing.  I would recommend that
everyone with free time jump over to CCEL and contribute to the editing
efforts on their digital facsimile editions at
http://www.ccel.org/index/facsim.html.  I hope Sword will eventually be able
to make use of most of this material, but it's still a useful contribution
even if we don't.

--Chris Little