[sword-devel] Quick Qwestion

[Chris Little]

On 11 Jan 2003, Chad Snow wrote:

> How many formats does sword support?  As I read this mailing list I see
> mention of GBF, XSEM, SF, STEP, OSIS and many more.  What are the
> formats that sword supports and which is the best to use for the future?

Sword really supports only its own data file format (which is really a set 
of many different formats for different kinds of books).  However, for 
import and internal markup of texts, we support plaintext, GBF, ThML, and 
OSIS to some degree or another.

Of those, OSIS is probably the most capable (excepting ThML for its 
display formatting abilities due to inheritence of ~XHTML).  All our texts 
will be moved into OSIS format shortly and it will be the format from 
which GBF, ThML, HTML, RTF, etc. are derived for display or export from 
Sword.

There is an importer (that may or may not work at the moment) for ThML 
format, but this will be easily converted to work with OSIS.

Some day we might support reading STEP natively (rather than as an import 
format) but that day is not quite here.

So for marking up texts, I would suggest OSIS.

--Chris