[sword-devel] compiling modules

[Beth Bryson]

I'm brand new to SWORD and this list.  I'm trying to compile some
modules for a friend to use in MacSWORD, and I have run into some questions.

1. Is there a way to use vpl2mod or imp2vs on a machine that isn't a
Windows machine?  I see the Win32 executables, but I would like to run
them in the terminal on my Mac.  Are there Perl versions of those?

2. For vpl2mod, does "prepended verse refs" mean that my text includes
the prepended verse info, or that I want to tool to prepend them?  My
text looks like this:

Matthew 1:1: This is the first verse.
Matthew 1:2: This is the second verse.

but it doesn't seem to use that verse information to decide where to put
the content, regardless of whether I choose 0 or 1 for that argument.  I
get better results with "1", but I still get a screen full of lines that
say "problem", with no indication of what the problem is or what line
the problem occurs on.  (I think it must occur on *all* the lines--there
are that many lines of it.)

3. My verse references seem to be ending up in the text.  In MacSWORD, I
see this:

Matthew
17
1 Matthew 17:1: This is the first verse
2 Matthew 17:2: This is the second verse

Is there a way to *not* have the "Matthew 17:1:" appear?  Does this have
to do with how I built my module?  Is it not parsing my verse refs?  (I
have tried it both with and without that final colon, and same results
both ways.)

4. The text I'm working with has some verses missing; do I need to put
placeholder text there?  For instance, if Mt. 2:21 is missing, then the
contents of Mt. 2:22 end up in Mt. 2:21, etc.

5. It seems to be expecting me to have :0 references for all the
chapters except chapter 1; if I don't, the content is off by one verse
per chapter (Mt. 2:2 ends up in Mt. 2:1, Mt. 2:3 in 2:2; Mt. 3:3 ends up
in Mt. 3:1, etc.)  Do I need to be sure there are 2:0, 3:0, etc. references?

6. It seemed like even if I used a 2:0 reference, the contents of that
didn't show up in MacSWORD.  This is a non-English text, and it would be
nice to at least have the title of the book appear in the same language
as the text.  I need to experiment more, but wondered if someone could
tell me what to expect.

7. I also tried using imp format instead of vpl.  Some things worked
better, but I still ended up with the references in the text, and
content offset if there were missing verses.  In this case my input
looked like this:

$$$Matthew 1:1
This is the first verse.
$$$Matthew 1:2
This is the second verse.

Even though I built the imp file in the terminal on my Mac (using my own
Perl script to convert from USFM), I changed the line endings from Unix
ones to DOS ones before moving the file over to my Windows virtual
machine to run imp2vs.exe on it.

8. The text I'm working with starts out in USFM, and it uses \s markers
for section headers.  Is there any way to make use of section headers in
a SWORD module, or are they just tossed?  Do I need to use OSIS format
or something else if I want to keep them?  Is MacSWORD able to display
those?  (I also have cross-references and footnotes, but I haven't
started thinking about whether those could also display.)

Thanks for any pointers you can give me.  Even if you can point me to
more documentation on the vpl or imp formats (such as what headers are
allowed and how to specify them), that would be appreciated too.

-Beth