[sword-devel] updated module-making instructions

[Chris Little]

On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Brook Humphrey wrote:

> Thanks Chris. I spent last weekend looking up both thml and osis and was 
> wondering if I did it in osis how it would be. I see you covered that though. 
> One thing, will sword ever support osis directly or will it always be 
> converted to gbf. 

I'm not sure what you mean by gbf.  If you mean General Bible Format (as 
in the markup language), we don't require changing to GBF.  We will 
support OSIS markup internally soon.

If you mean general book format, we don't necessarily require using the 
general book module type.  We'll support OSIS markup for Bibles, 
commentaries, dictionaries, etc.

If you mean to ask whether we're going to support OSIS documents without 
any import/processing, the answer is essentially no.  There will always be 
some kind of processing and indexing at least.  We might integrate an 
osis2[gbs|vs|ld] type of utility in Sword and the frontends at some point, 
so that any user could easily import an OSIS book, but that just moves 
the conversion processing from the developer to the user.  We might also 
embed such a tool in a way that the original OSIS document is used as the 
data file and is unmodified, so that it can be changed in an editor and 
re-indexed by Sword very easily.  I'm not planning to do either of these 
immediately and Troy hasn't suggested that he was going to either, but 
they would make nice additions.  To the user, they won't make a lot of 
difference other than forcing them to endure a bit of indexing time 
whenever they install new OSIS modules.

--Chris