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<font face="FreeSerif">There was recent mention on sword-devel of a
new English translation, the Berean Bible. Its creators lean
really heavily on easy licensing and maximized distribution, hence
its name in reference to Acts 17. The NT support is complete, but
as yet OT has been only partially published. For my purposes in
module generation, the tables distributed for NT do not yet have
full equivalents for OT.<br>
<br>
Nonetheless, I was interested in generating modules particularly
because the content allowed me to produce for the first time a
genuine interlinear Bible module. While any Sword app can use
them, Xiphos' blocked display provides for especially good
presentation -- better than their own PDFs, considering that they
doesn't use a vertically blocked layout. (Their PDF actually looks
like regular Sword engine output, with parenthetical alternate
content.)<br>
<br>
So there are now 4 modules, 2 Bibles and 2 dictionaries. I need to
emphasize that these are draft modules, proofs of concept. I have
worked on ways to generate these for a few days, scripting content
auto-editing out of CSV-formatted content from the distributed
*.xlsx tables.<br>
<br>
In Xiphos repository:<br>
BIBdraft - Berean Interlinear Bible - Hebrew + Greek with English
interlinear encoded as lemmatized content<br>
BSBdraft - Berean Study Bible - basic English Bible<br>
BereanMorph<br>
BereanStrongsGreek<br>
There isn't yet a Hebrew dictionary.<br>
<br>
The generating scripts are part of the module content for each.
Generating BIBdraft takes about a minute and a half on my laptop,
once the relevant columns from the *.xlsx have been saved to the
needed separate file. The scripts describe their needed input.<br>
<br>
When the OT support is finalized, I will work these up again
without the "draft" name and obsolete these.<br>
<br>
Because OT support isn't complete, these are somewhat minimal
other than the interlinear support. No footnotes, paragraph
breaks, headings, or red letters. Content necessary to describe
these features is present in the NT tables, but in trying to
generate consistent form, I didn't try to use it all because it
doesn't yet exist for OT as well. They are Feature=NoParagraphs
(verse per line).<br>
<br>
The use of their own morphology means that I generated a module
for it. This will lead to some changes in Xiphos soon so that
Strongs and morphology dictionary choices can be associated
per-Bible rather than (as now, in Prefs) for the application as a
whole.<br>
<br>
Strong's numbers are present in both regular markup form as well
as simpler per-word footnotes. Enable either or both; the n=X
attribute uses the Strong's number itself, which may be useful, or
in Xiphos you may wish to disable that aspect from the context
menu, if you prefer that simple mouse-over of plain "*n" reveal
the number in the previewer. The reason for providing both ways is
that enabling regular Strong's in Xiphos means that the English
lemma content no longer lines up with the original word, because
the order of content out of the engine presents the Strong's
number first. So you can disable regular Strong's display, keep
the footnoted Strong's, and have lined-up interlinear content.<br>
<br>
There were some considerable oddities in how the markup worked,
especially for OT, forcing me through a bunch of attempts to get
something that worked at all. The released content provides
Strong's numbers plus BDB commentary, as well as minimal parse
content. The oddities come out of Hebrew being an RtoL language.
In Xiphos, whose display is driven by WebKit, a regular all-Hebrew
module like WLC displays in strict RtoL form: Verse number
beginning on the right, and text flowing from there to the left.
This is achieved simply by issuing "dir=rtl" in the preamble to
output. But BIBdraft is listed as Lang=en (it contains English
from one end to the other, plus Greek, both being LtoR, and only
the Hebrew is RtoL.) In BIBdraft, apparently WebKit notices that
there is LtoR content right off the bat (English lemmatization),
and goes halfway: The verse number displays on the left, but the
content is RtoL as expected. This is OK with lemma display
enabled. However, with Strong's encoded in both the regular mode
as well as in a per-word footnote that links internally to
StrongsRealHebrew, when footnotes are enabled (each precedes the
word), without any other control offered to WebKit, the display
goes entirely LtoR, which is of course wrong for Hebrew, but right
for English. Bluntly, WebKit can't get the right result, no matter
what any one person wants.<br>
<br>
Also, even more weirdly, an early cut used the BDB content as the
per-word footnote. With footnotes enabled, OT text display went
completely insane -- one line per word, and a great deal of unused
vertical whitespace, 2 or 3 lines' worth between every pair of
words. Useless. Disable footnotes, and it goes back to normal.
Now, these are footnotes, they don't display inline at all, yet
being enabled made things insane in the mainline display. I
couldn't explain it, and I couldn't control it, so I scaled down
the per-word footnotes to the prev'ly-mentioned refs to
StrongsRealHebrew.<br>
<br>
I didn't originally intend to make these modules public, but I am
curious how others feel about the display. So I thought I'd name
them carefully with "draft" suffixes and unleash them for others
to critique. I'd like to know how you feel about them, in any
frontend, though of course Xiphos concerns me personally the most,
and questions of how to improve the interlinear presentation will
top the list.<br>
<br>
--karl</font><br>
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