[sword-devel] content creation software

[Chris Little]

Has anyone put any thought into creating some content creation software?  If
you've followed Online Bible releases of late, you'll see Larry P is doing a
lot less work in the content creation area, but he is helping Ernie
Spillman, Jonathan Dixon, Gary Gallant, et al who do OLB module creation by
releasing content creation software for OLB.  The result is that the many
people interested in contributing content are putting out more e-books for
OLB than we currently can.  The same people have also expressed considerable
interest in SWORD and a willingness to contribute content to it, but they
don't know how. :)

As much as we may love our Linux, most users are still in Windows-land, so
if content creation software were written, it would be best if written
either for Windows or in a Windows-compatible toolkit like wxWindows or GTK
(I think).  And if anyone ever needs assistance with the many data formats
we use (or perhaps just GBF & ThML since they will probably be our the
predominant formats) or with our indexing format--I'd be glad to help.  We
also have the tools Troy wrote for module creation in the SWORD source tree
and I have some other tools written in perl that might be an aid to people
writing new software for this purpose.

On another front entirely, I've got the ThML filters mostly working so we
can more reliably use ThML modules, and I've been experimenting with making
some perl scripts that can convert files exported by Logos into SWORD
modules.  We may not be able to sell this stuff ourselves, but we can at
least make it possible for people who own them in other formats to convert
them to our own to use with our software.  I'd much prefer that people who
already own an NIV or NASB in other formats just convert them to SWORD
format rather than paying for a 2nd copy, anyway.  I mean to work something
up for OLB modules too, since the OLB converter we have presently stopped
working when Larry P changed the export formatting in OLB 8.1.

--Chris Little