[sword-devel] Sword exporter (Diaspora)

[Chris Little]

> This is very cool. the only thing that would make it even 
> cooler is if it could also do the conversion the other way 
> around, from those formats to sword. :) Possible?

Yes, this is the plan, sort of.

Plain text import is already handled by vpl2mod.  OLB import is already
handled by prn2sword.  Palm Bible Reader import format is not really
necessary.  GBF has very little content and is not as extensive &
capable as ThML.  So I will likely only write a ThML->Sword converter.

Writing an importer for the output from Diaspora would be easy since its
output is very verbose and regular.  But I'm going to try to use libxml
to parse the ThML document into a DOM tree so that it will handle
<scripContext> and such.

I'm also contemplating the possibility of not-modifying the source file
and just generating index files.  The pro is that we could allow people
to make corrections, click re-index, and have a new working module.  The
cons are that it precludes compression and would require a new module
driver to read from a single data file instead of ot & nt files.

Initially the importer will have a command line interface and be written
on Linux, but a port to Win32 and a simple GUI are likely.

--Chris