[sword-devel] Some questions about the WEB module

[John Zaitseff]

Hi, Chris,

Thanks for replying so quickly!

> > 1. Who is the maintainer of this module?
>
> I maintain the WEB and associated translations modules.

Should there be a wiki page somewhere to capture this information?  Or 
perhaps a simple line in the relevant web.conf?

> Do you know there to be meaningful updates to the text in the most
> recent revision(s)--meaningful meaning not changes to spaces or minor
> markup and not changes to the Apocrypha (since we don't support them in
> the current WEB module anyway)?

No, I don't know; I only have an old version from 2010, and I know there are 
changes from that.

> I use usfm2osis.pl.

I presume with manual tweaking, as described in 
http://www.crosswire.org/wiki/Converting_SFM_Bibles_to_OSIS ?  If so, could 
you possibly send me your most recent OSIS file?

The reason I'd like the OSIS file itself, as opposed to just using the SWORD 
module, is that I'm hoping to develop some small tools (XSLT stylesheets 
included) to transform OSIS to other formats.  And I'd like to have some 
decent OSIS texts to play with, other than the KJV (that OSIS file does not 
use paragraphs, poetry, etc)!

A related question, by the way: how well does mod2osis work when the 
original was an OSIS file?  That is, if file.osis is processed thus:

  file.osis -> osis2mod -> mod2osis -> newfile.osis

How close is newfile.osis to the original file.osis?

> One of the biggest problems with usfm2osis.pl is that it was not
> originally written for USFM and it grows piecemeal to target USFM input.

I sort-of guessed that!

> One of my personal Summer projects will be to write a USFM to OSIS
> converter from scratch, but for that I won't be touching the
> usfm2osis.pl codebase.

This was precisely what I was talking about.  However, summer is a long time 
away, especially down under in Australia! :-)  A few questions:

1. What is technically wrong with the script at osis-converters
   (http://code.google.com/p/osis-converters/)?

2. If there ARE technical limitations with sfm2osis.pl script there, is it
   better to work with that than start over yet again?  How amenable is that
   maintainer to accepting patches?

Beware of the NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome!  I occasionally fall into 
the trap myself, but I _am_ trying here to work with people.

Yours truly,

John Zaitseff

-- 
John Zaitseff                    ,--_|\    The ZAP Group
Phone:  +61 2 9643 7737         /      \   Sydney, Australia
E-mail: J.Zaitseff at zap.org.au   \_,--._*   http://www.zap.org.au/
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