[sword-devel] How to access raw OSIS files

Greg Hellings greg.hellings at gmail.com
Tue Mar 10 15:01:21 MST 2020


On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 4:08 PM Philip White <philipwhite at cedarville.edu>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm interested in building a linux command line module viewer. From
> the wiki and the FAQ, it seems that the only way to work with the
> modules available from the website is to use the SWORD library. If the
> raw OSIS files were available, then I think I could write a
> low-dependency piece of software (counting all dependencies) since I
> will probably not use everything that the library provides.
>

Sword is a very low dependency piece of software. The only dependencies I
know of are optional: ICU, cURL and CLucene, mostly. It's tough to get much
lower dependency than Sword. Also, there is already a command line viewer
included with Sword that is very featureful: diatheke.


> Is there a place I can get OSIS modules for something like the KJV
> with Strong's numbers module? My understanding is that the modules
> format acts as a sort of DRM for those modules that need to have some
> copyright protection. However, a lot of Bibles, commentaries, and
> books are public domain, so there would be nothing preventing the
> distribution of the OSIS files.
>

Crosswire maintains the OSIS for the KJV module. However, other sources
could come from any number of different locations. You'd have to check
every conf module independently to determine if it mentions where the
source files are. Some do, some do not. For some the source could come from
a different format (e.g. ThML, GBF, plain-text, Sword's proprietary imp
format, etc).


> In summary, my question is how I can obtain the files in the
> standardized OSIS format instead of the undocumented modules format
> that modules on the website come in.
>

This is the beauty of the Sword library. It hides all the rest of those
questions:
1) Which format did it come from? OSIS? ThML? Who even knows?
2) What is the source of the original text? Could be nearly anywhere.
3) What is the source encoding? Could be lots of things. Sword will
normalize this all to UTF-8 for you.

I would highly encourage you to use the Sword library itself. It's already
a very small, very dependency-weak library. You may be surprised at how
easily it ports to all manner of destinations.

--Greg

>
> Thanks,
> Philip
>
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