Thank you for considering working together with us for our Lord. I really enjoy the hearts of the people I've met who are involved with Wycliffe.
I bet we can get something working solid for you. Not sure if David Landin explained what CrossWire is all about, but briefly, we're a place where engineers can come and volunteer their time freely for projects geared toward spreading the Great News of our Lord.
Your idea about giving us a first hand experience of the current situation sounds wise! Personally, I haven't used Visual Basic or VBA for years! But I'm sure many of our developers are up to speed in this area. If you want to send the material to me, I will get it into the hands of capable engineers and we'll give you our prognosis and then we can go from there.
Also, not sure if you've seen our latest work, but we have been working on an addition to our free software for the ABS and the SBL hopefully in time for the SBL meeting next week. You can see a preview at:
http://www.crosswire.org/sword/biblenew/
This web interface to our software engine is easily installed on most any server and dynamically serves any installed books that it finds. If you'd like to consider making your commentaries available in the OSIS format, you'd be able to take advantage of this tool and the many other software products that you can see on our home page at:
http://www.crosswire.org/
Anyway we can help, it's our pleasure to serve you in your endeavours for our Lord. That's why we're here.
In Christ, -Troy A. Griffitts.
EasyEnglish Webmaster wrote:
Hi Troy
My name is John Williams and I work in my spare time on a voluntary basis for Wycliffe Associates UK. David Landin (the director of Wycliffe Associates UK) has suggested that I contact you because you may be able to help us with a project that I am involved in.
The project is called EasyEnglish. It involves writing Bible commentaries in simple English for the benefit of pastors and other Christians who do not have commentaries in their own language but are able to speak a little English and are able to read material with a very small vocabulary and simple grammar.
We publish our commentaries on our website (www.easyenglish.info) and also provide them free of charge on CD-ROM. The website is becoming very popular and the commentaries have spread all over the world - 170 countries at the last count. They are used by individuals and also by pastors, missionaries, Bible study leaders, Sunday school teachers and others in a wide variety of ministries. We are still working on the commentaries and adding more materials to our website each month.
In order to standardize the vocabulary and grammar in our commentaries, I have written a set of VBA macros which form an add-in to Microsoft Word. These macros are used by our EasyEnglish authors when they write and review the Bible commentaries. This has worked sufficiently well to get our project off the ground but it does have some difficulties. I think the main problem is that our authors use different versions of Windows and Word and these slight differences can cause problems with the macros. Also, we don't have a proper installation program - we just have a set of instructions that new authors have to follow. Most of our authors are not expert Word users (or expert computer users) and this can cause problems.
If you feel you are able to help us in this project, I think the first step would be for someone to evaluate our current set of macros from a software developer's point of view and suggest improvements that could be made. One possibility might be to replace our VBA macros with a stand-alone exe program.
I think the best way would be for us to send you a copy of the VBA macros together with the instructions we send out to new authors. You would then be able to experience the difficulties "first hand" and be in a good position to advise and help us.
Regards
John
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