[sword-devel] Wanted : Sword utility to convert MarkDown to GenBook

[David Haslam]

Ah - but though MarkDown is largely used for presentational purposes, there’s a sense in which it is almost as well structured as (e.g.) USFM. It’s just that the structures are more general than particular to Bibles.

Take headings, e.g.

# is equivalent to \s1
## is equivalent to \s2
### is equivalent to \s3

Likewise some of the other MarkDown features.

It’s much easier to edit than HTML.
In fact, that’s the whole raison d’être.

IMHO, it ought to be feasible to go straight from an MD file to one of the input formats we can use with a Sword utility for module build.

Using HTML as an intermediate stage seems rather counterproductive to me.

David

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On Wed, Feb 20, 2019 at 17:30, Greg Hellings <greg.hellings at gmail.com> wrote:

> As with most such proposals, going from a presentational markup to a semantic markup is neither straightforward, nor guaranteed any measure of particular success. Even just looking at the first few documents at the URL you've provided, the automation into OSIS would be non-trivial. The first two documents are completely bespoke, indicating author, title, table of contents, etc using completely arbitrary presentational markup with no inherent semantic meaning that I can discern.
>
> The individual chapters and so forth would be relatively straightforward, even though the markup is, again, completely arbitrary. As such, any conversion utility written for this would be completely bespoke to the particular documents being translated.
>
> Further, I could very much be mistaken but I thought that GenBooks were not available from OSIS. I thought OSIS was only used for Scripture/Commentary markup that follows a chapter:verse arrangement. I thought we were stuck using IMP format with raw, ThML, or RTF input for formatting. If so, conversion from these files into a format like that would be very straightforward. MD->HTML renderers already exist, and one would just need to iterate the files, read their content into such a renderer, and output the resulting IMP format file.
>
> --Greg
>
> On Wed, Feb 20, 2019 at 4:59 AM David Haslam <dfhdfh at protonmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Here’s an example of a source text in MarkDown format.
>>
>> https://github.com/DavidHaslam/From-Death-Into-Life
>>
>> FROM DEATH INTO LIFE
>> by William Haslam (1818-1905)
>>
>> [no relation]
>>
>> If we could readily convert this to OSIS by a suitable script, then we could distribute the work as a GenBook module.
>>
>> It’s just one sample of stuff I was involved with earlier this century well before I became a CrossWire volunteer.
>>
>> Who would like to volunteer?
>>
>> Best regards.
>>
>> David
>>
>> Sent from ProtonMail Mobile
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 16, 2019 at 17:22, David Haslam <dfhdfh at protonmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> We could probably vastly increase our available resources if someone were able to develop a Sword utility to convert MarkDown file[s] to a GenBook module.
>>>
>>> Anyone up to this?
>>>
>>> Best regards
>>>
>>> David
>>>
>>> Sent from ProtonMail Mobile
>>
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