[sword-devel] Sword, PHP, and PostNuke

[Chris Little]

On Fri, 10 Jan 2003, Patrick Narkinsky wrote:

> Does anyone know off-hand if support for STEP format would accomplish these
> goals?

In short: no.  But if you're interested, it would be great to have the 
STEP drivers completed since they will bring us a lot of content without 
any work (or need to secure licensing).  I would personally be very 
thankful for STEP drivers since I have a pretty big library from 
QuickVerse and e-Sword is beginning to have some involvement with STEP 
book sales that we could point people towards 
(http://www.e-sword.net/step.html).

STEP is an old standard, based on RTF, with many limitations, and a
general document paradigm that (at least I think, but obviously others
didn't) is poor.  It is also relatively Windows-centric (thanks to RTF), 
not open, expensive to author for ($4125 once + $995 yearly thereafter), 
and generally defunct as a standard.

Its versification is static; it just supports a handful of other common 
Bibles.  It cannot, for example, handle the versification of the BHS or 
the LXX (or most Catholic Bibles). OSIS handles these fine by not 
requiring you to fix to any particular versification, though this will 
become a need when mapping between versifications is addressed.

STEP marks things according to appearance, not semantics.  OSIS is just 
the opposite.

OSIS handles everything on Michael's list, though some items are not 
addressed specifically (such as poetry/prose formatting, which would be 
done with style sheets).

--Chris