[sword-devel] KJV 1611

[Barnes, Jeffrey]

Hi Swordsmen,

One thing I’ve been hoping to see is someone interested enough to make a KJV 1611 module. I like the version for a few reasons, like the natural flow of the text, it’s poetic nature is beautiful to me, and the Reformation principle of clarity is followed imho.

So since the Sword project doesn’t have a 1611 module yet, I’d like to investigate what’s involved in making it.

One thing is that to be true to the 17th century printing, the alternate spellings of the text would have to be followed. The typeface used in the facsimiles I’ve found is a Gothic black letter face. I don’t want to use that, because it would make it unduly hard to read, especially on mobile and computer screens. I think one would need to use a roman, perhaps sans face for readability.

But the roman faces that are used to render the text don’t use glyphs like the long ’s’, the ‘thorn’, the rotunda ‘r’, etc. I think those are important visual cues to the reading of the text. So if I would write a parser, it would replace the roman text source (probably ascii range code points) to replace glyphs with unicode according to the printing rules of the era.

Is this work happening currently?

If so, could I help?

If not, where could I get a text source? I’ve seen facsimile renderings with roman parallel renderings, but they are a page at a time. It would be good if there was one or two files already with the roman characters.

After the parser, then there’s the work of making it a module. Where can I find a procedure for doing that? Is it a manual process?

I haven’t started any work yet, just thinking.

Any help appreciated.

Jeff