[sword-devel] The SIL Pathway project

[David Haslam]

Thanks for pursuing these matters with your colleagues in Wycliffe, Greg.

The variety of HTML used in connection with export for Go Bible is
*XHTML_TE*.

In our Go Bible source code SVN repo, GoBibleCreator trunk does not yet
support this format. The processing of data in this input format to make a
Go Bible application is still under development.

The  http://crosswire.org/wiki/Projects:Go_Bible/SymScroll SymScroll  branch
of GoBibleCreator will be supporting this input file format. 

Erik Brommers of SIL in Dallas is collaborating with our other sole
volunteer programmer on this branch, i.e. Daniel Sim. Erik has the
responsibility of developing the Java class for XHTML_TE.  Daniel is working
on the rest.

One thing does concern me.

I have the impression that most programmers involved in this at Wycliffe/SIL
are unaware of the shortcoming inherent in 
http://code.google.com/p/gobible/wiki/GoBibleDataFormat GoBibleDataFormat ,
namely the consequences of having missing verses or single markers for
multiple verses. 

When processing source text, Go Bible Creator does not use the numerical
values of verse tags at all !
It just renumbers all verses sequentially in each chapter (starting from
v1).  This means that verse ranges and/or missing verses require a prior
workaround, otherwise the subsequent verses are numbered incorrectly. This
is the situation for Go Bible whichever permissible source text format is
used: ThML, OSIS, USFM [or XHTML_TE].

The SymScroll branch of GoBibleCore is beginning to address this shortcoming
by defining further additions to GoBibleDataFormat. These are detailed in
the wiki page, but as yet are only implemented for processing USFM as source
format. These extensions have not yet been fully tested.

Several times since 2008, I have issued a call for more volunteers to become
involved on the software development side of the Go Bible project. During
2009, we had good input from a former programmer at SIL Dallas, who has
since moved on to a new career outside SIL. Being few in number, we still
need more help in both programming and software testing.

Though smartphones are taking the lead in market share in developed
countries, Tim Jore of Distant Shores Media has reported that 60% or so of
the global church is using non-smart phones. So for the foreseeable future,
there is still a strong need for Go Bible as a Java ME application, despite
the difficulties caused by relying for Unicode font coverage on the phone
manufacturer's firmware.

Thanks once again, and I hope this reply will prompt a few on this list to
get more involved. 
And even those who are not involved technically, please pray for the
project.

David Haslam
Go Bible project leader for CrossWire.

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