[sword-devel] Naves

[DM Smith]

Chris Little wrote:

> 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.

I'll get to it tomorrow after work.

>
>> 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.

I called Jerry Kingery from Bible Foundation and they no longer maintain 
the texts. When asked they point to Sword and CCEL as the keepers of the 
text. I asked him whether it is appropriate for the confs to mention 
Bible Foundation as the source of the text and he feels that it is no 
longer appropriate.

I am trying to locate the source for what used to be on bf.org. As you 
noted earlier the files on the wayback are not valid zips.

>
> 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.

The only thing missing are what you noted. And they are useful for the 
purpose you noted. Also, because of the proximity of the markers to the 
word that they refer, it would help creating cross references.

Before I start marking up the text, I will post a recommended schema for 
the file (OSIS of course, but specifically what subset and how it will 
be used.) And then we can discuss it, change it and improve it until we 
reach consensus. Hopefully this will become a model of how this kind of 
thing should be marked up.