On Sat, 2013-04-13 at 10:42 +0600, John Austin wrote: > >>>> I've worked with many, many SFM texts, and they often do not follow SFM > >>>> rules or play nice in a variety of ways.
And İ think this is the crux here. USFM attempts to separate content from presentation, albeit not as effectively and thoroughly as OSIS. But many users of USFM do not appreciate the concepts of separating content from presentation. I have lost count of the USFM texts where I found one or another structural mark abused to provide some display/presentational info or, maybe worse, found certain structural content consistently marked with some of the few remaining presentational markers, sometimes arbitrarily employing different solutions from chapter to chapter or instance to instance. This is part of the course of USFM - particularly when produced outside of the UBS/SIL circles. As a module maker I do not see my role in slavishly copying bad USFM into OSIS, thereby bending OSIS in ways it was not intended, but will question again and again, until I understand what the meaning of any particularly doubtful construct is. Most of the time I get the response I need, sometimes it needs some explanation as the concept of separating content and presentation is a new one to many - sometimes I can feedback my improved reading of the structure back to to the translators and give them better USFM texts. And sometimes I clearly hit a brickwall. > >>>> All of this greatly > >>>> complicates > >>>> an already serious conversion from SFM to Sword. Indeed. But no one has promised us an easy job. And sometimes our job entails to tell USFM producers that what they have done is actually abuse of USFM. > I still can't see the argument for requiring that everyone call these > questionable instances paragraphs, and require that they must always be > marked up as such. Why not give the publisher the option of calling it a > paragraph if they consider it a paragraph, or else calling it an indent > if they think it will be more correctly understood as an indent? For > instance, many people consider that a paragraph should be followed by a > blank line (between paragraphs). What if I desire that this indented > line in my translation should never have a blank line after it, and that > it is an actual indent which is the content I intend to add- in order to > make my text more understandable? Then I should be able to call it an > indent. I would be very correct in doing so. Future readers of my OSIS > file would also unambiguously understand my intentions as well. Matej has asked what the meaning of an indent should be in a reading application should be. But more to the point - what did IBT make of David's GoBibles which to the best of my knowledge do not contain any indents? We are all here entirely committed to preserving the text as faithfully as possible. But this requires under the circumstances occasionally the need to ask, give feedback re bad USFM practice and refuse to give up until the meaning of every presentational construct is understood. Wrt one point you made - that the translators inserted by hand every single indent. I can believe that. All Bible translators I met are like that. The willingness to crack your skull in the most mind-numbing way in order to achieve what you want to achieve is clearly part of the genetic code of a bible translator. It does not alter the fact though - someone has misunderstood paragraphing and separation of content and presentation, someone has misunderstood that the concept of a paragraph is quite abstract and by no means has to require a half skip and a 3em indent, but could be presented in all kinds of ways - whatever is most natural for a language and script. Peter _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel@crosswire.org http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
