[sword-devel] Naves

[DM Smith]

Chris,
    When I compared nave.dat to the zip from biblecom.net, I found only 
a few differences. The Sword Module does not maintain the book order of 
the words, but rather alphabetizes them with what appears to be an ascii 
collation. And the cross references using the T0000456 notation are 
removed. Also, a special marker that preceded the T* reference and also 
a small handful of (n/a) (these were left in the text) were changed to 
something more printable, a chevron.

Also, in the original, there were two SIN entries, which are now SIN (1) 
and SIN (2) The first one is the dastardly deed and the second is the 
desert between Elim and Sinai. (I am wondering whether this is correct. 
Should a dictionary require uniqueness of entry names? Can we manage 
this with two different osisIDs, say SINdeed SINloc?)

My thought was that I would prepare a complete OSIS document and then 
build the module from that. In doing so, I think that it would be good 
to preserve the original book order of the terms. Will this cause a problem?

DM

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.
>
>> 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.