Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Henry Churchyard" <churchh AT usa.net>]

From: "John Richards" <jhr AT universalist.worldonline.co.uk>

>> The original form of the OTA BHS text as contained in the archive
>> http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/bigpersonal/bhs-text.zip doesn't
>> have any lines longer than 60 characters, as verified with the
>> following AWK program:
>> {if (length($0)>x) {x=length($0)}};END{print x}

> This may well be true, but by the time the earlier CCT files have
> done their work there are a good 50 or so lines that are well over
> 60 characters - as the R2L.CCT error messages also show.
> Furthermore with the present choices offered by the OTA site (HTML
> or ASCII and no option for right click + Save As) there is no option
> but to load the text into a browser to start off with - which is
> even less desirable.  This is why I have so urgently wished that
> pressure could be put on OTA to offer both a ZIP file and the right
> click + Save As option.  If I am wrong that one ends up with 50 or
> so lines too long for the R2L.CCT process, I would be very glad if

> you could describe in detail how one is to avoid getting this.  I am
> glad to see though that someone has got permission to make make a
> ZIP version of the OTA file available.  I have been warned that I
> was breaking OTA conditions by doing so without permission.

I have no experience with the SIL software (I only ever used the
little 1988 CONVBHS.COM program for the first step, and then custom
hand-written text-processing scripts from there on out) -- but you'll
never know whether the SIL software is buggy or not until you apply it
to a BHS text known not to be corrupt (and any text with non-tildecode
material on the same line following a tilde code, such as you have
described, is in fact corrupt).  I described in a previous post how to
trim bytes from the beginning or end of a file using a small DOS
program -- and so without subjecting the text to the suspect mercies
of a general-purpose word processor.  I feel no need to ask the OTA
people for permission, since I'm complying with the conditions that
were placed on the text I downloaded when I downloaded it (as is amply
and redundantly documented within the ZIP archive itself).  I might
feel slightly more inclined to comply with any retroactively-imposed
_ex post facto_ changing of the rules that they've dreamed up if they
were doing a good job of distributing the e-text from their site --
but in fact they're doing an execrably wretched job of distributing
the text from their site, making the functionality of their site
critically-dependent on a mass of poorly-written and
frequently-malfunctioning browser scripting code, and corrupting the
non-SGML BHS e-text with a buch of SGML garbage.  I remember the OTA
site when it was basically an anonymous FTP site with a few simple
HTML 2.0 web-pages tacked on to provide a front door, and frankly, I
liked it a while lot better back then.

--
Henry Churchyard   churchh AT usa.net   http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/