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There is one more bizarre break with
USFM syntax: the vertical bars in the \fig ...\fig* marker. There
must be exactly 6 of those, separating 7 fields. Four of those
fields are marked in the specification as being mandatory, but
don't count on them being nonzero length. Until recently, Paratext
never enforced the structure and contents of those fields.
If it seems that USFM is more complex than it needs to be, your
assessment agrees with mine. It is that way, however, because of
the history of the evolution of the standard, with changes made
incrementally, trying to not invalidate large numbers of existing
texts in USFM. For example, the character style terminator marker
was an afterthought. The ability to nest styles was an even later
afterthought. Both of those potentially conflicted with the pure
flat one character style allowed to be active at a time philosophy
that worked for so many simple Bibles for so long. Now, however,
there are many examples of nesting of character styles in
real-world Bibles.
I hope all of this helps. Your questions, Ryan, are good ones.
On 01/02/2016 03:34 PM, Kahunapule Michael Johnson wrote:
On 01/02/2016 12:50 PM, Ryan Hiebert
wrote:
The definition of a marker, the only formal definition I can find for it, is that it goes from a '\' (backslash) to the next ' ' (space). Unfortunately, this is not sufficient for two reasons. The first is that a marker may be on it's own line, and a newline immediately following, without the space required by the definition. The second is that more parsing than that must be done to identify an specific marker, as each marker has its own requirements for the text that may follow it, and some markers must be used together (specifically, those with matching ending markers).
MOST USFM markers start with "\" and terminate with white space
(space or newline) or "*". There are two oddball official markers
that don't follow this pattern: "~" and "//". There is also the
unofficial but widely used shortcut of "<" for "‘", ">" for
"’", "<<" for "“", and ">>" for "”". If a marker has
an end marker, it is the same as the beginning marker, but with
the terminating space or newline replaced with "*". Note that the
space after "\nd " is part of the marker, but the space after
"\nd*" is not part of the marker but part of the text. This little
bit of detail is important in avoiding adding spaces where they
don't belong, such as in the Khmer language.
You can try to get access to Paratext. It might work. Either way,
there is another USFM editor that works almost the same: Bibledit.
You can get that for free from http://Bibledit.org.
--
Aloha,
Kahunapule Michael Johnson
MICHAEL JOHNSON
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PUKALANI HI 96788-1143
USA |
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MLJohnson.org
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Skype: kahunapule |
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