Biblical Hebrew Forum

["John Richards" <jhr AT universalist.worldonline.co.uk>]

> I am glad that your experience was more like mine. I think that John
> Richards may have been working with a different version or corrupted copy
of
> the OTA text.

The text I was using was indeed slightly corrupted with some residual HTML
codes, but that was not the main source of the problem. The main problem is
that the SIL CCT files assume a text in which the ~c ~x ~y book, chapter and
verse codes are all on a separate line from the main text. This is not the
case with the OTA version, at least as it now stands and is delivered. It
was only when I saw a sample piece of text that Peter Kirk had used as the
basis for a test conversion that this became clear.

For my own use, I have written a little bog-simple CCT to make the necessary
change to the OTA text -

c CCT to preformat OTA BHS text for conversion to SIL format
"~c" > d10 "~c" d10
"~x" > d10 "~x" d10
"~y" > d10 "~y" d10

It seems to do the trick adequately, but I am sure someone could do better,
and it might be better incorporated into the OTA_CV.CCT, but I did not feel
I had any authority to start tampering with that.

The only corruptions I find remain are those due to the "occasional missing
line-breaks" on the OTA text.

> Following, for everyone's information, is an explanation of the ] marks in
> the text. This is taken from one of the WTS documents.

The explanation of the ] marks is very helpful, and makes sense of something
which seemed a very strange "corruption", though there was the clue that
they almost always occur on ketib/qere readings. Thank you.

John Richards