[sword-devel] Taming Wild Threads (was: Getting stuff done (Re: External links))

[Chris Little]

Matthew Talbert wrote:
> I think maybe you're missing something here. We have non-programmers
> who want to create modules. You just told them to read the source code
> so they would be able to generate correct files. I can't stress this
> enough:
> 
> THIS IS WHAT EVERYONE IS HAVING AN ISSUE WITH IN REGARDS TO OSIS SUPPORT

It's not really a necessity that someone understand C++ well in order to 
write a quick list of supported tags, based on the filter code. If the 
code mentions 'lemma', presumably that indicates support for the lemma 
attribute on <w>. If it mentions 'lg' or 'l', presumably it's doing 
something to support those tags. And so forth.

I probably only wrote on the order of 20% of the current filter code, so 
I'm no more an expert than many others from the code side. And as far as 
actually testing features in frontends goes, I would think everyone is 
equally capable, at least to the extent that everyone can test on some 
subset of frontends.

And the work need not be complete and exhaustive. If someone starts 
plugging information into a chart in the Wiki, undoubtedly others will 
contribute.

> So I'm clear, what I personally need for understanding how to use OSIS
> for module creation would be very small mini-module examples that
> cover the current supported features well, along with appropriate
> content. If you could do this, i will gladly learn OSIS and help out
> with error correction.

I think the KJV module, which is posted, might be one of the best 
examples of OSIS usage. I'll post the MorphGNT and Tisch's 8th modules 
when I get around to converting them, since they will demonstrate some 
rather arcane and Sword-specific encoding practices that we intend to 
use for multiple lemmata per word.

On the TEI front, I think I posted one of the Webster's dictionaries as 
an example (though it might no longer be best-practice encoding). And I 
do intend to post the new Strong's lexicons once I'm a little more happy 
with them. A multitude of nice, if not quite the correct format we're 
looking for, texts in TEI exist for download from Perseus. Their only 
problem is that they are TEI P4 whereas we are using a variant of TEI 
P5. So I'll probably post the new Josephus modules, based on Perseus' 
documents but collected and converted to P5.

That should provide a nice collection of examples.

--Chris