[sword-devel] Help wanted on non-canonical text

[Chris Little]

I see some technical and practical problems with this suggestion.

johnduffy at cgcf.net wrote:
> Chris,
> 
> In Bibledit the deuterocanonical markers \dc_ ... \dc* outputs to OSIS such
> as:
> <reference type="added" edition="dc">Mar leanas a ghabh an litir:
> </reference> 

Simply from the perspective of conformant OSIS, "added" isn't a possible 
value of reference's type attribute, so this wouldn't validate. More 
importantly, none of this OSIS markup is being used correctly.

USFM's \dc_...\dc* tags do mark off a segment of deutero-canonical text 
for the purpose of exlusion from particular editions.

OSIS's <reference> element is for marking references to parts of a text 
(the same text or another text). The most common use would be to use 
<reference> to surround a Bible reference, e.g. <reference 
osisRef="Gen.1.1">Genesis i, 1</reference>.

I would recommend that, if you want to mark particular books/chapters as 
canonical according to various editions, you place some kind of tag 
within the editions attribute of each book (or chapter for those books 
that have chapters of differing canonicity). Using c as a token for 
Catholic canon and p as a token for Protestant canon, if a book is 
accepted as canonical by both Catholics and Protestants, you might have:

<div type="book" osisRef="Gen" editions="c p">

for a Catholic-only book:

<div type="book" osisRef="Gen" editions="c">


> It would seem good to use this so that frontends could potentially switch on
> or off the deuterocanonical/LXX content as desired, if the program allowed
> this.

Neither any front ends nor Sword itself could support this. In order to 
allow them to support this, editions would have to be marked on every 
single verse and we'd have to move to a system in which the verse 
element is retained by osis2mod (which I believe Troy still opposes).

This would itself leave a blank verse for every deuterocanonical verse, 
since every verse would still be a part of the text, it's contents would 
simply be masked.

A better solution would probably be to simply issue two editions of the 
text if there are really communities that don't use and would be 
offended by the deuterocanonical text. One edition can use a 
versification such as NRSVA and another the NRSV v11n.

> I don't think I can display a mod in KJVA v11n yet using a frontend, so I
> can't check out if dc content will display as such.  Do you know if the
> latest osis2mod will handle this reference type?

Admittedly I haven't tried yet, but the BibleCS that Troy posted should 
work fine with the KJVA. Assuming he compiled with the latest SVN of 
Sword, it would even support the Bibles using the Synodal v11n.

--Chris