Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

Henry

> 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).

You are quite right, of course - and I did precisely that. I used for later
trials the version you have put on your site. As you say, it is far better
formatted, and avoids the need to reformat the position of the tilde
markers. However, it makes no difference to the end product using
the SIL software. Unless I went throught it at the last stage before the
conversion to Right to Left, there were always approx. 50 lines
indicated by the L2R process as being over 150 characters long, and
resulting in a garbled line in the final text (words in the wrong order, or
even omitted completely). It may be, as you suggest, that there is a bug
in the SIL software. It seems, in fact, rather likely. But the fact does
remain, that if one goes through the text at the penultimate stage visually
checking for long lines (which stand out and are easy to catch), one
then ends up with what is, so far as I can see, a perfect text. That is
all I am concerned about, both for myself and for anyone else who
wants to try and convert the OTA BHS using the SIL CC files. I have
no experience with any other conversion system. If there is a better
one, it might be a good idea to let members of the list know about it.
I would certainly like to know about it myself.

> 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 have looked carefully at the conditions as stated in the files included
in your ZIP file, and compared them with the conditions now placed
on the OTA site. As Bob Barrett points out in a message to the list today,
the conditions have been changed significantly. I would say you are
perfectly justified in adhering to the conditions stated in the files as
you originally received them.

> 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 bunch of SGML garbage.

Quite so!

Best wishes

John Richards