[sword-devel] Translators' workarounds for Guillemets in USFM files

[Chris Little]

Jonathan Marsden wrote:
> Not entirely incidentally... is there a reason that the usfm2osis.pl 
> script is not distributed as part of the SWORD source tarball?  Is there 
> any reason *not* to add it to future Debian/Ubuntu sword packages, so 
> people using SWORD (and its osis2mod utility) from packages have an easy 
> way to obtain and use the usfm2osis.pl script too?

The *2osis.pl scripts are just a collection of scripts I wrote over the 
years and finally put online a couple years ago to share with others who 
might be interested in converting material to OSIS. usfm2osis.pl 
probably has the longest history since it was originally written for an 
ABS job and has more recently seen development by others like Daniel Owens.

They're used for Sword development and linked to from our wiki, but 
these utilities aren't really part of The SWORD Project. In particular, 
they are useful to individuals concerned with conversion for purposes 
other than Sword content development, they are under a different 
license, and unlike every other Sword utility, they don't use the Sword 
API at all. They're all in permanent beta, so people should expect bugs 
and incomplete markup support (especially in the USFM converter), and 
they should be willing to fix the inadequacies themselves.

I don't anticipate having any objection to packaging the perl utilities, 
but they have significant differences from the Sword utilities in the 
tarball.

--Chris