Ideally the Sword engine could be adopted to a program such as you are
talking about, but whether one is in progress or not I do not
know. Since the Sword project is just the engine producing the
text, the formatting would have to be a new front-end idea.
Typesetting of whole works, particularly of an entire Bible, would be a
very complex procedure, and I don't believe that a program could be
written in any trivial manner that could handle a single leanguage and
certainly not one that could be applied to multiple languages. I
would be surprised if it is not possible to get a normal print-off from
some of the front ends. I don't have any in front of me to check,
but I would imagine that out of the selection available (BibleTime,
Gnomesword, BibleCS, Biblestudy, MacSword and the related JSword) at
least one of those is available with printing support, thus enabling
someone to print out a selection of Bible ranges (most seem to be
limited to displaying one chapter at a time, so the user would be
limited to prtining one chapter at a time).<br>
<br>
I think a major question would be if there is actually a market of
people who would use it and be aware of its existence. I have
trouble imaginging that someone with enough access to the Internet, a
computer and printer and able to download Sword from within a
"restricted area" would go to the trouble of making a hard copy of that
Bible text that could be traced back to them. But, perhaps, I am
mistaken. Most or all of the texts that come with Sword seem to
be ones that have been around for some time, so the commercial use of
such an open source program seems dubious to me as does the liklihood
of a person producing multiple copies of a Bible off of a home printer.<br>
<br>
That said, there might be a market for non-nationals to take in a
computer with Bible software containing scriptures in the native
language and thus not have to worry about smuggling in printed
Bibles. If that person was so equipped, they could then run off
copies of the text in the native area. However, I still think it
would require a massive undertaking of coding, especially by people
familiar with typesetting and layout of texts, to produce a program
that could conceivably churn out a printable version of the Bible.<br>
<br>
Just my $.02 on the matter (OK, so it's more like $20.00, but you get the idea).<br>
<br>
--Greg<br>