[sword-devel] KJV 2006 - 3rd beta

[DM Smith]

jhphx wrote:
> DM Smith wrote:
>> I have readied another beta. Please take a look at it for problems 
>> with these changes and prior ones. There is still more to be done 
>> (fixing punctuation and spelling mistakes) so no need to report these 
>> yet.
> As you noted there are differences in the texts often used today and 
> the text that this module is suppose to be a copy of. Over the years I 
> have received many reports of spelling mistakes in this module and in 
> others. Most often they were not mistakes, and the modules were, in 
> these cases, true copies of their source texts. In some cases I was 
> surprised to find the reports wrong. Sometimes the same text has a 
> word spelled more than one way. You can not just compare one verse in 
> a text to another verse in the same text. You have to compare the 
> verse to the source verse. You also can not assume that one of the 
> spellings in the source text was a mistake. Both spellings may have 
> been allowed spellings at the time of publication, even though one may 
> look wrong to us today. If you use another text as your standard for 
> spelling any changes based on that other text should be considered 
> provisional and need to be tracked until they can be confirmed by the 
> true source text. As the Sword Project is the home of this electronic 
> text perhaps it would be good to have ways to track changes and 
> compare to earlier editions. This list gets archived but knowing what 
> is in it to search for it is another thing.
>
> Jerry
Let me share how I hope to find differences and make changes and you can 
let me know if this addresses your comment:
1) Use the "The Scofield Reference Bible" (now called the Old Scofield 
Study Bible) as the standard for comparing text. It won't be used to 
validate paragraph markers or old testament margin notes as they are not 
in this printed text. The reason for this version is that many "KJV 
Only" groups regard this as the closest available version of the 1769 
edition in print today.

2) Where this module's text differs from any of three other electronic 
versions, we will compare it against this hardcopy edition of the KJV 
Bible and make the change for that verse. The various etexts are: one 
from ccel.org, one from printkjv (etext of the interleafbible.com) and 
one from gutenberg.org. These are being prepared as "VPL" (verse per 
line) text only files in a comparable format.

3) All changes are being made under source code control and are being 
made by a program. This does two things, first source code control 
preserves a record of the changes and second the program makes it this a 
"scientific process", which is reviewable and repeatable by peers.

And then run it through MS Word spell check (Just kidding!)

When this is done, the text probably will not be identical to the "Old 
Scofield". It might be that all the etexts agree with each other and 
differ from the Old Scofield. This would not be flagged and thus would 
not be changed.

It is possible to store the variants in the module itself. (There is a 
Greek module with this feature.) Would it make sense to do it here? 
Doing this will complicate indexing and searching, at least at a phrase 
level. It may also require changes to front-ends.


In His Service,
   DM