[sword-devel] NET Bible help requested.

[Chris Little]

Tom Whittemore wrote:
> Brother Chris:
> 
> I have composed a couple of NET Bible modules,  one with footnote 
> markers and one without.  I am currently struggling with the NET Bible 
> Commentary module.  I hesitate to bother you, but I really need your 
> help.  Although I have the HTML source available,  I have composed a 
> e-Sword module in MS Access with the fonts in RTF format.  Since I have 
> made a lot of alterations to it,  I would prefer to use it as my 
> source.  The problem that I am having is in converting the RTF fonts  
> (Hebrew, Greek and Transliterated)  into Unicode fonts.

You'll have to go through the Hebrew, Greek, transliterated, and any 
other fonts (I recall an apparatus font, but that might have been part 
of the transliteration font) and make tables of all the codepoint values 
in the font and their corresponding Unicode values. Then you'll have to 
parse the whole document, doing codepoint substitutions whenever one of 
these fonts is used. I used Perl for this, but really you could use any 
language with which you are comfortable or possibly something like TecKit.

> Could you please give me some idea of just how you composed the version 
> of NET Notes that I have seen.

Something else to bear in mind is that the correct way to handle 
footnotes is within the text of the Bible document. When I did the 
separate NET/NETNotes modules, Sword did not handle footnotes well. 
Since then, footnotes have been placed in popup windows. Frontends also 
have the option of placing notes in a separate window, though none that 
I know of have opted to use this method.

--Chris