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DM Smith wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:463622D0.5010905@yahoo.com" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Kahunapule Michael Johnson wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">How does the Sword project handle display of OSIS text quotations when:
1. the <q> or <speech> element is used without a marker attribute,
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->The speech element is not handled, except to process its content. It is
as if the element were not in the text at all. I think the speech
element is to indicate the speaker, not that what's said is a quote. I
won't mention the element <speech> below.
</pre>
</blockquote>
OK. I have no need to generate the <speech> element, as there is
no USFM equivalent, so I'll ignore it, too. :-)<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:463622D0.5010905@yahoo.com" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Assuming that the module's conf does not have osisQToTick=false (i.e. it
defaults to true when not present), then the level attribute determines
the quotation mark that will be used, alternating double quote and then
single quote. If no level attribute is present, then it uses a double quote.
It will use the same mark when it gets to </q>.
</pre>
</blockquote>
In that case, would open quote reminders be inserted at paragraph and
stanza beginnings automatically, or would that require a cQuote
milestone to make happen? (I'm just curious. Normally, I'm interested
in just making sure this doesn't happen, since the quotation
punctuation is already fully specified, and it may not conform to
current English usage. However, in the hypothetical case where someone
wanted this to happen, I'm curious how it would be done.)<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:463622D0.5010905@yahoo.com" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">The same holds true when milestoned versions of <q> are used, except
that <q eID="xxx"/> elements will not cause the code to look at the
opening <q sID="xxx"/> for a marker attribute. Instead, it will use the
marker attribute, or it's lack to determine what to output.
</pre>
</blockquote>
So in the milestone elements, markers may vary. That is actually good,
since sometimes quotes are introduced with an em dash and close with a
newline, or some other asymmetrical case.<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:463622D0.5010905@yahoo.com" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">
However, if osisQToTick=false, no quotation mark is used.
</pre>
</blockquote>
So osisQToTick=false is essentially equivalent to putting a marker=""
attribute on all <q> elements?<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:463622D0.5010905@yahoo.com" type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">2. the <q> or <speech> element is used with a marker attribute,
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->
When the marker attribute is present, it is used.
</pre>
</blockquote>
Good. :-)<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:463622D0.5010905@yahoo.com" type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">3. no <q> or <speech> elements appear, or
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->Then as far as sword is concerned then it is not in a quote.
</pre>
</blockquote>
OK... what, exactly, does that mean? Does that make a difference for
anything besides the option of rendering Words of Jesus in red (or some
other alternate color) for display? Normally, the point of knowing if
something is in a quote or not is to display the quotation marks
correctly, but if there are no quotation marks to display (or they are
already in the text in whatever way is appropriate for that language),
then Sword doesn't actually need to "know" when something is a quote
or not, does it? Or is there some search feature or function that I'm
not aware of that would use such knowledge?<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:463622D0.5010905@yahoo.com" type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">4. quotation punctuation (, , , , «, », , newline, etc.) appears
outside of <q> or <speech> elements (i. e., not in a marker attribute)?
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->Any punctuation in the text is produced as is.
</pre>
</blockquote>
This is good. Very good. :-)<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:463622D0.5010905@yahoo.com" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Another feature of OSIS is <milestone type="cQuote" marker="xxxx"/>
This is used for a continuation quote. (substitute xxxx with the
appropriate quote mark)
</pre>
</blockquote>
This is good to know. I regard this (or something like it) as an
essential feature if all quotation marks are going to be put in markup.<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:463622D0.5010905@yahoo.com" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Words of Christ (WoC) can be indicated by adding who="Jesus" to the <q>
container element or to both the milestone elements. In the KJV, ESV and upcoming NASB modules, the WoC are marked on a per
verse basis, using the container form of <q>, with marker="".
</pre>
</blockquote>
This is an interesting concept-- and one that is helpful to me. You
see, I thought that marking WoC per verse was bad OSIS the way I read
the documentation, but it sure makes conversion from USFM (which
actually demands that sort of markup) easier (because I don't have to
discard adjacent end + start pairs with no actual text in between, just
a verse marker), and it also makes display easier on a verse-by-verse
basis (like Sword does) easier if you are working from raw OSIS. The
same technique would be useful for translating the USFM \qt ...\qt*
markup (which is marked verse-by-verse to indicate OT quotes in the NT)
to <q marker="" who="OT" sID="somethingunique">...<q marker=""
who="OT" eID="somethingunique">. If you regard this as acceptable,
then I'll just embrace it quickly before anyone objects. :-)<br>
<br>
OSIS is very flexible, and there seem to be many reasonable ways to
interpret how Scriptures should be encoded. At this point, there are so
many ideas out there, I would like to just start with one goal:
encoding OSIS texts from USFM in such a way that Sword displays them
properly. If that works, then there is a good chance the resulting OSIS
will be of use to others, as well.<br>
<br>
Would it be too weird to separate q elements intended for replacing
punctuation (with marker specified) from those used for what is
essentially a character style (i. e. WoC)? Like <q marker=""
sID="aoeu"/><q marker="" sID="qjkx" who="Jesus"/> (actual
quotation) <q marker="" eID=qjkx" who=Jesus/><q marker=""
eID="aoeu"/>, where the actual quotation may span several verses,
and the inside set of markers may be ended and restarted with each
verse?<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:463622D0.5010905@yahoo.com" type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">I want to (1) ensure that Bible texts are displayed correctly, and (2)
minimize the amount of manual labor necessary to make #1 happen.
It should not be necessary to do any manual editing of Bible source
texts in well-formed Unicode USFM to create a valid Sword module. (USFM
or something close to it is the format in which a very large number of
minority-language Bibles exist.) In USFM, quotation punctuation, if any,
is in the text of the document, with no special markup. In an informal
extension to USFM, sometimes << is used for , < for , etc. (A space is
required to disambiguate and .) Speaking of ambiguity, apostrophe,
closing single quote, and (in some languages) glottal stop all use the
same character. This ambiguity, coupled with language and style
considerations, seems to be a serious problem in automatically
converting from either GBF or USFM to OSIS, in general.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->I have recently written a quote recognizer in C++. I did find that an
apostrophe is potentially ambiguous, but in the source I was working, it
was not an issue.
Fortunately, my input use ` for a single quote start and ' for an end
quote. This made disambiguation significantly easier.
If you wish, I can send you the routine.
</pre>
</blockquote>
I already have some LGPL C# code that does a reasonably accurate job of
recognizing quotation marks in English text that I use for checking
quotation-mark balancing. It doesn't work very well for other
languages, because it uses some English-specific rules to disambiguate
apostrophes and closing single quotes, and doesn't even handle the case
where the same marker is used for glottal stop. (The latter is bad
practice in Unicode, but some people do it anyway.) Does your quote
recognizer work for non-English Bibles with different writing systems
and different punctuation rules?<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:463622D0.5010905@yahoo.com" type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">I'm wondering if I should target OSIS or GBF as a target format for a
converter I'm writing, and also working on updating the dialect of OSIS
that the World English Bible and HNV are distributed in. While I'm not
in favor of dropping support for GBF, yet, I'm not very thrilled about
the idea of putting any new work into supporting it, either. However, if
I can't make an OSIS module without a lot of manual labor, any
reasonable alternative is worth considering.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!---->Remembering your earlier posts about OSIS's lack of quotation support, I
think I can now say that it provides you the level of control that you
wish. Having done three modules myself, I think that OSIS 2.1.1 is
sufficient for Bible texts.
So, I'd suggest OSIS.
</pre>
</blockquote>
Indeed, it looks like I have at least two ways to get the level of
quotation support I want: (1) always put quotation punctuation in
marker attributes of q elements or cQuote milestone elements and
specify empty marker elements when using q just for WoC, or (2) [pause
to don body armor and start running] always put quotation punctuation
in the text and use q elements with empty marker attributes just for
translating USFM \wj ...\wj* and \qt ...\qt* markup on a per-verse
basis. Option #1 has the major disadvantage of requiring finding all of
the quotation punctuation in text I may not be able to read, let alone
understand the grammar of, for conversion purposes. Option #2 has the
disadvantage of potentially offending certain people who have, at least
so far, held the deep religious conviction that all quotation
punctuation should live in markup, not the text of the Bible, but it
has the major advantage of the simplest, fastest conversion possible
from USFM to OSIS, with no manual labor required for each translation
(other than making sure the source text is really in Unicode USFM).
Although option #2 seems like it would work just fine, at least
functionally if not idealistically, I'm concerned that someone might
think such texts weren't pure enough OSIS, and not use them. If that is
the case, then perhaps I really would be better off going back to
GBF... or just punting on this whole converter and move on to improving
my converters to other formats for other Bible study software.<br>
<br>
In the case where the translators have made use of the <<, <,
>, >> quotation markup option in their SFM, which is actually
a fair number of them, I would like to convert those to the appropriate
q elements with markup specifying the normal equivalent of those
markings. I'm loathe to mess with apostrophe/ending single quote
disambiguation for non-English texts, though. I don't see any benefit
to doing so, really, but maybe I'm missing something?<br>
<br>
What do you think?<br>
<br>
Michael<br>
<br>
<br>
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