[sword-devel] Pathway, SIL, GoBible and CrossWire

[Martin Denham]

Hi Greg,

AndBible has always been able to display Psalm 119, even on low powered
devices, and many people say that, far from being slow, it is very
responsive.  I can only think that Greg was getting confused with some other
bible software.

Martin

On 19 October 2011 19:29, Greg Hellings <greg.hellings at gmail.com> wrote:

> Some time ago David pointed out the SIL Pathway project, which is a
> plugin for the Paratext. Paratext is a popular scripture translation
> editor which is available from the United Bible Societes
> (http://paratext.ubs-translations.org/) and is popularly used within
> Wycliffe Bible Translators. Paratext, from what I understand, natively
> operates in USFM for saving and editing files. Pathway is an FOSS
> plugin (http://code.google.com/p/pathway/) that SIL has developed for
> use with Paratext and FieldWorks which will facilitate digital
> publishing of works out of Paratext and into various media. It is
> mainly developed to help streamline the process of export and
> encourage the translators to consider things like copyright, licensing
> and DRM. It supports export at present to GoBible, PDF, E-Book (epub),
> Logos and Open Document Text (OpenOffice/LibreOffice). For the GoBible
> export, Pathway will actually create the entire .jar file ready for
> directly loading onto a cell phone.
>
> David had expressed surprise at why there was not method to export to
> a SWORD module but there was a method for GoBible export.  I was down
> at the Wycliffe/SIL center in Dallas yesterday for the finale of their
> biennial Bible Translation conference. While there I had a chance to
> sit in on a talk being given about the uses of Pathway, its purposes
> and its aid to the WBT community. Afterwards I got to speak with Greg
> Trihus, who is the lead of that project about the absence of SWORD
> export.  His comments were quite illuminating.
>
> The real thrust of the Pathway project is getting the scriptures into
> an electronic form that is useful for distribution on mobile devices
> or for print.  As such they support GoBible for low-end machines,
> E-Book and Logos for smart phones, ODT for to-print media and PDF to
> cover all of the above.  Several people in the discussion asked about
> getting the scriptures into a form where they could directly enter a
> scripture reference rather than having to scroll through an ebook or
> PDF on a smartphone (the Logos option supports that, but involves
> several more steps for the content author who needs to pass the file
> through the hands of several people at SIL and then on to Logos so the
> work can be hosted in the official Logos content system). Greg told me
> that he had considered the Android mobile options - since many of the
> target people with smart phones would be Android users - but when he
> had tested AndBible it had been woefully slow and had even crashed
> when opening longer passages like Psalms 119. Therefore he had avoided
> putting his own human resources onto developing a SWORD format
> exporter and was not advertising that through the Pathway project. He
> did leave me with a few action points which he would love to see:
>
> 1) Since Pathway is open source, he would welcome anyone from our
> community who wanted to develop a Paratext/Fieldworks -> SWORD
> converter. The export is done through an XHTML/CSS pathway, and they
> are supporting any form of output, not just scriptures. This would
> include commentaries, dictionaries and general papers/books. Pathway
> is written in C#, so if there are any C# developers around looking for
> something to do, this would be a highly desired project which wouldn't
> be another "Just write a front-end in my language because I want to"
> contribution to both world-wide scripture distribution and CrossWire.
>
> 2) Improve the quality of AndBible (JSword based?) and/or Bishop
> (Troy's proof-of-concept frontend based on the SWORD library with Java
> bindings). There is a round-about way that SIL can publish these
> scriptures to the YouVersion application framework, but YouVersion
> does not incorporate any linkages with Dictionaries. Greg expressed a
> strong desire to see SWORD formats supported due to our ability to
> closely integrate a text with a lexicon/dictionary - a sister text
> which almost all WBT translation projects will develop in parallel
> with their scripture translation. Those of us over in the BibleTime
> world are also hoping to eventually support mobile versions of
> BibleTime, but the time frame for those is definitely long term since
> it would involve a major refactoring effort on BT to separate the
> backend code from the GUI portions before any work could begin on a
> mobile UI based on Qt.
>
> 3) Help with the C# bindings for SWORD. I know some people have talked
> about them in the past, but I don't know what state they might be in.
> Since Pathway is written in C#, it would be a great help to anyone
> writing a SWORD export path if they could access the engine bindings
> directly through C# rather than having to dump to a file and somehow
> invoke a copy of the utilities.  The people who are interested in
> using Pathway are incredibly illiterate when it comes to technology -
> most of them weren't even able to identify the differences between a
> smart phone and a "feature phone". So any export would need to write
> out an entire module, ready to be uploaded directly to a hosting
> location (or possibly a single ZIP archive which could be emailed to a
> technical member of SIL by the translator for hosting). Our SWIG
> bindings are OK and already in use for Python and Perl, and SWIG
> supports C#, so hopefully getting them working would not be a huge
> burden for someone. As the current pumpkin holder for SWIG I am
> willing to work with anyone who wants to tackle adding C# to the set.
> I don't work in C# at all, so I can't touch that myself.
>
> Greg's final comment was along the lines of, "There is desire and need
> for SWORD support in Pathway, but no one is asking for it because they
> don't realize they need and desire it." That sentiment is in line with
> the (extensive) questions I heard after the presentation. I have
> passed on to him information about PocketSword, because they do also
> want to support the iOS platform and he was not aware of PocketSword's
> presence there. I would encourage anyone with fingers in these areas
> or a desire to help on any of these action points to take them up
> (including putting them on a list of available projects on the wiki,
> David, if there is such a page?). SIL did not overlook us because they
> don't want to support us or because they are unaware of us - there
> were just some technical challenges.
>
> --Greg
>
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