[sword-devel] Calvin's commentaries, and ThML to OSIS conversion

[DM Smith]

Luke,

This is great!

Chris has been maintaining a set of transformation scripts in SVN. 
Perhaps your xslt could be added there.

Yes right now osis2mod expects commentaries to be encoded as a Bible. 
This is not the way it should be. I guess I'm the owner of osis2mod 
since I touched it last :) Anyway, I should have some free time in the 
middle of August to take a look at upgrading it to handle properly 
encoded commentaries. Please remind me around then.

In Him,
DM

Luke Plant wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've been trying to create a Sword module containing all of Calvin's 
> commentaries, using the ThML sources from CCEL.  I've made good 
> progress, and some of my work should be reusable for other projects.  
> I've read that Sword is trying to move away from ThML to OSIS, so the 
> module will be an OSIS module.  I've been careful to remove any manual 
> editing, so that everything can be generated automatically from the 
> ThML (in case of any updates to the the sources).
>
> The main steps are:
>  
> 1) Make some corrections to the ThML (use of scripCom tag in 
> particular) - DONE (implemented using Python script)
>
> 2) Combine all the ThML files into a single ThML source - DONE (Python)
>
> 3) Convert to OSIS.  I've done this using XSLT, and I'm intending to 
> release my thml2osis.xslt as a separate project.  It is about 90% done 
> (at least in terms of translating Calvin's Commentaries), and has tests 
> and so on.  It should be a useful and portable utility for converting 
> other CCEL sources.  (The test suite is currently executed using unix 
> tools, which would be a problem for Windows developers.)
>
> 4) Import as a Sword module.  The problem here is that osis2mod is 
> basically for importing Bibles only -- it expects you to use <div 
> type="book">, <div type="chapter"> (or <chapter>) and <verse>.  These 
> are not really natural or semantic ways to mark up a commentary. A more 
> obvious and natural way to do it is like this:
>
> <div type="section" annotateType="commentary" 
> annotateRef="Bible:Gen.1.1"><p>Blah blah...</p></div>
>
> I do actually have a Python script which converts this markup to the 
> that expected by osis2mod, but it uses DOM, and memory usage for the 45 
> Mb input OSIS file is prohibitive.   Anyway, I think creating a version 
> of osis2mod for commentaries is the better way to handle this (I did 
> find an old message in sword-devel saying that an importer would be 
> written if OSIS commentaries were provided).
>
> I would write the osis2mod modifications myself, but I've looked at 
> osis2mod and the main function that needs modifying, handleToken(), is 
> a bit of a beast -- about 400 lines, about 20 local variables etc.  I'm 
> not confident enough with Sword to be able to refactor it properly, and 
> I don't want to do large amounts of copy and paste.
>
> So, is someone willing to help out with this final step?
>
> Also, is there a place where I should release this stuff?  I think Sword 
> needs a 'sword contrib' project, or at least a section on the wiki that 
> details how to get these different things.  I get the impression that 
> the main Sword developers have various scripts to help them, and a 
> central repository for these kinds of tools would be very helpful.  A 
> Bazaar repository would probably be ideal -- I could put up a 
> publically readable one for my stuff.
>
> Regards,
>
> Luke
>
>