On 04/14/2012 12:30 PM, Mike Hart wrote:
USFM has been evolving slowly, but has mostly been in a very backward-compatible way, with just a few additional tags being added. There is one very significant change on the horizon that isn't yet documented, and that is support for overlapping character styles. For example, a future release of Paratext will support USFM markup like "\wj xxxxx \add xxxx\add* xxxx\wj*".
I suspect that support for these hard character styles will never fully go away, and I hope they don't. Indeed, I will keep supporting them in my software even if Paratext doesn't. The reason is that I have seen cases in real translations where there simply is not a tag that actually means what the translator intended by using such styles. In some cases, there might be an equivalent, but the work of figuring out what it should be is just too hard, especially in the case of translators who have already gone home to be with Jesus. You could probably argue that some translators made bad choices in assigning meanings to certain forms of markup. You could also argue that some translators made bad choices in terms of selecting characters for writing their languages. In some cases, you might be right, but it is still too late to change any of these things. Thus, idealism must yield to humility and pragmatism wins out over purity of markup theories.
UBS gave me this stable link: http://ubs-icap.org/usfm, which generally redirects somewhere that you can find the latest USFM documentation in CHM, HTML, downloadable HTML, and PDF formats. USX documentation should be coming from UBS, soon. In the mean time, Paratext can generate samples of it if you have access to Paratext. |
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