There was recent mention on sword-devel of a new English translation, the Berean Bible. Its creators lean really heavily on easy licensing and maximized distribution, hence its name in reference to Acts 17. The NT support is complete, but as yet OT has been only partially published. For my purposes in module generation, the tables distributed for NT do not yet have full equivalents for OT.
Nonetheless, I was interested in generating modules particularly because the content allowed me to produce for the first time a genuine interlinear Bible module. While any Sword app can use them, Xiphos' blocked display provides for especially good presentation -- better than their own PDFs, considering that they doesn't use a vertically blocked layout. (Their PDF actually looks like regular Sword engine output, with parenthetical alternate content.) So there are now 4 modules, 2 Bibles and 2 dictionaries. I need to emphasize that these are draft modules, proofs of concept. I have worked on ways to generate these for a few days, scripting content auto-editing out of CSV-formatted content from the distributed *.xlsx tables. In Xiphos repository: BIBdraft - Berean Interlinear Bible - Hebrew + Greek with English interlinear encoded as lemmatized content BSBdraft - Berean Study Bible - basic English Bible BereanMorph BereanStrongsGreek There isn't yet a Hebrew dictionary. The generating scripts are part of the module content for each. Generating BIBdraft takes about a minute and a half on my laptop, once the relevant columns from the *.xlsx have been saved to the needed separate file. The scripts describe their needed input. When the OT support is finalized, I will work these up again without the "draft" name and obsolete these. Because OT support isn't complete, these are somewhat minimal other than the interlinear support. No footnotes, paragraph breaks, headings, or red letters. Content necessary to describe these features is present in the NT tables, but in trying to generate consistent form, I didn't try to use it all because it doesn't yet exist for OT as well. They are Feature=NoParagraphs (verse per line). The use of their own morphology means that I generated a module for it. This will lead to some changes in Xiphos soon so that Strongs and morphology dictionary choices can be associated per-Bible rather than (as now, in Prefs) for the application as a whole. Strong's numbers are present in both regular markup form as well as simpler per-word footnotes. Enable either or both; the n=X attribute uses the Strong's number itself, which may be useful, or in Xiphos you may wish to disable that aspect from the context menu, if you prefer that simple mouse-over of plain "*n" reveal the number in the previewer. The reason for providing both ways is that enabling regular Strong's in Xiphos means that the English lemma content no longer lines up with the original word, because the order of content out of the engine presents the Strong's number first. So you can disable regular Strong's display, keep the footnoted Strong's, and have lined-up interlinear content. There were some considerable oddities in how the markup worked, especially for OT, forcing me through a bunch of attempts to get something that worked at all. The released content provides Strong's numbers plus BDB commentary, as well as minimal parse content. The oddities come out of Hebrew being an RtoL language. In Xiphos, whose display is driven by WebKit, a regular all-Hebrew module like WLC displays in strict RtoL form: Verse number beginning on the right, and text flowing from there to the left. This is achieved simply by issuing "dir=rtl" in the preamble to output. But BIBdraft is listed as Lang=en (it contains English from one end to the other, plus Greek, both being LtoR, and only the Hebrew is RtoL.) In BIBdraft, apparently WebKit notices that there is LtoR content right off the bat (English lemmatization), and goes halfway: The verse number displays on the left, but the content is RtoL as expected. This is OK with lemma display enabled. However, with Strong's encoded in both the regular mode as well as in a per-word footnote that links internally to StrongsRealHebrew, when footnotes are enabled (each precedes the word), without any other control offered to WebKit, the display goes entirely LtoR, which is of course wrong for Hebrew, but right for English. Bluntly, WebKit can't get the right result, no matter what any one person wants. Also, even more weirdly, an early cut used the BDB content as the per-word footnote. With footnotes enabled, OT text display went completely insane -- one line per word, and a great deal of unused vertical whitespace, 2 or 3 lines' worth between every pair of words. Useless. Disable footnotes, and it goes back to normal. Now, these are footnotes, they don't display inline at all, yet being enabled made things insane in the mainline display. I couldn't explain it, and I couldn't control it, so I scaled down the per-word footnotes to the prev'ly-mentioned refs to StrongsRealHebrew. I didn't originally intend to make these modules public, but I am curious how others feel about the display. So I thought I'd name them carefully with "draft" suffixes and unleash them for others to critique. I'd like to know how you feel about them, in any frontend, though of course Xiphos concerns me personally the most, and questions of how to improve the interlinear presentation will top the list. --karl
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