From: "Christopher V. Kimball" <mail AT cvkimball.com>
To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [b-hebrew] Westminster Leningrad Codex coding and markup.
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2006 07:28:49 -0400
The WLC text of 5 June 2006 was in the Michigan-Claremont (MC) coding
used by WHI and this list. It was not in Unicode or in XML.
Conversion from MC coding to Unicode isn't as easy as one might hope.
XML markup is trivial, anyway you'd like to do it.
With XPath-based processing, a simple way to gather statistics on the
text is to look at contents of w, k, and q tags in the site's book
files, ignoring the "higher" tagging details. That is, examine "//w"
and "//q" for the text with qere variants. All meaningful text is within
these three tags which occur at the same level (verse tag, v).
A Java application WLC2XML is available without restriction to convert
from the WHI-MC file to Unicode/XML with the site's particular/peculiar
XML markup. Its source (and class) files of WLC2XML are in
I believe one part of the Sword project (Andrew Sperlin) has already
developed its own decoding from this application.
Another possibility is to use software to re-tag the site's markup to a
preferred markup. The site's smallest tagged unit is the word (w, k, q
tags) although individual Unicode characters sometimes (rarely) have
text decoration tags within them. The markup is described by an XML
Schema file, Tanach.xsd, in the main directory. There are no
restrictions on this approach either.