David Haslam wrote:
Some Bible translators use a workaround when editing USFM files for
locations where they would otherwise have used
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemets Guillemets .
They sometimes type "<<" in place of "«" and ">>" in place of "»".
Likewise, they may type "<" in place of "‹" and ">" in place of "›".
Does anyone in CrossWire know whether the SFM to OSIS conversion tools
(either CrossWire's script or the Snowfall Software program) make any
attempt at recognizing this, and performing the conversion "intelligently" ?
I don't see any obvious attempt to do this kind of thing in the
usfm2osis.pl script. I downloaded it from
ftp://crosswire.org/pub/sword/utils/perl/usfm2osis.pl (foud by a Google
search) and the script itself says it is version 1.4.
Perhaps a "better" place for such conversion could be at the point of
saving or exporting the SFM files in Bibledit (or whatever USFM editing
tool is in use). This would allow the software concerned to prompt the
translator to confirm their intent to use guillemets, rather than making
possibly incorrect assumptions in a batch conversion tool after the
fact, which might even be being run by someone other than the translator
concerned and who therefore might not know the translators original
intent, even if prompted about it. Furthermore, the question itself at
save time could (hopefully) act as a training tool, so that the
translator would in future learn to use real guillemets while editing.
Might it be practical (and helpful) to ask Teus to add this kind of a
check when saving or exporting to SFM, to Bibledit? Similar enhancement
requests could be made against other USFM editing tools, too.
Not entirely incidentally... is there a reason that the usfm2osis.pl
script is not distributed as part of the SWORD source tarball? Is there
any reason *not* to add it to future Debian/Ubuntu sword packages, so
people using SWORD (and its osis2mod utility) from packages have an easy
way to obtain and use the usfm2osis.pl script too?
Jonathan
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