[sword-devel] Naves

[Chris Little]

DM Smith wrote:
> Well I am starting to work on updating "Naves". I am trying to track 
> down the source. I mentioned earlier that I found a copy of naves.zip at 
> http://aibi.gospelcom.net/downloads/naves.zip. But bf.org no longer has 
> any e-texts posted. I searched the Internet and all references to naves 
> was to one or the other of these.
> 
> I took a close look at it and also at the naves module (using mod2imp). 
> The one at gospelcom.net looks to be an older copy (has the phone for 
> the Bible Foundation BBS while the module has the website address).
> 
> There are some other differences. While I have not gone over it line by 
> line, it appears that the Sword module has additions and corrections.

Could you characterize the additions/corrections? An example or two 
would help too.

> This brings up an interesting issue. I get the impression that Sword 
> modules are a transformation of an original electronic text. In the case 
> of Naves, the transformation is slightly lossy in that it throws away 
> some markup. I think that it is important to preserve the source from 
> which the modules are created. I would like to suggest that going 
> forward that we try to do this for new modules. At least for those in 
> the public domain.

Looking at the nave.dat file that ships with the module, I would suggest 
using that as a basis. I made this module before imp2ld or any of the 
other generalized import tools were written, so it uses a concatenated 
version of all the Nave's data files from bf.org. The indexer I wrote 
would have simply identified the title and the start & end points of 
each article and written them to nave.idx, leaving the whole .dat file 
intact.

At the time, Sword didn't support much of anything in the way of markup, 
except for #...| (indicating cross-references). The only other markup 
present in the original files that I see are italics for the titles 
(which aren't even an accessible part of the articles in the index) and 
the OLB topic hyperlinks (which were removed since they would just 
appear as garbage in Sword). If you're referring to the removal of the 
latter as lossiness, you need to bear in mind that they are simply a 
convention used in early versions of OLB. They would not be used in an 
OSIS encoded version of the document since OLB topic database numbers 
have no real meaning. The article title itself should be used for 
osisIDs as well as osisRefs to the entries with those osisIDs. (The 
topic numbers would be useful for creating the links themselves for an 
OSIS version, but there is no circumstance under which it would be 
appropriate to display them to users, and at the time there was no 
practical way to include them in the .dat but hide them from users.) If 
there was something else that was removed, I haven't noticed it.

--Chris