Converting documents to ThML

Converting Documents to ThML

Perl programs are available for converting from HTML to ThML (especially for HTML documents from Word 2000) and for converting ThML to text and to a linked web of HTML pages. You'll need to have a perl interpreter and (probably) Microsoft Word 2000.

To prepare a document in Word, create a named character style called XML. If you like, you can import that style and others from the sample16.rtf document. Then put in <divn> tags as required, and add other markup as desired, using the XML character style. If you are using the predefined styles, you could mark a scripture reference by selecting it and changing it to the scripref style, perhaps with a keyboard equivalent of alt-s. For more information on markup, see the simple markup guidelines or ... [pending]

The conversion scripts, available as h2h.gz, are split into a number of steps, both for speed and ease of development. The steps are these:

mkmeta -- generate a file with the ThML.head information, such as author, title, etc.
de-ms -- convert from Word 2000 HTML to more-or-less standard HTML. There are special conventions for footnotes and other constructs, though.
htm2thm -- convert the output of the previous step to a valid ThML document.
ncrease -- change <pb n="iii"/> <pb/> <pb/> to <pb n="iii"/> <pb n="iv"/> <pb n="v"> etc. Also for <divn n="I"> elements.
parsescr -- change <scripRef>Rom. viii. 28.</scripRef> to <scripRef passage="Rom. viii. 28" parsed="|ROM|8|28|0|0">
identify -- add id attributes to all important elements
index -- change <insertIndex/> elements to indexes
thm2htm -- make a nice web of linked HTML files.

All of these are performed by the "h2h" script. On a unix system, type "h2h bookID" omitting the .htm extension. The rest will be done for you. Be prepared to wait a few minutes for large files.

If you have HTML files from another source and you can't first read them into Microsoft Word, you can try the process, but I haven't tested it for that use.

Known bugs: This software is still under development. It works reasonably well on a couple of documents, but there are some bugs.

HTML output is not valid

ThML generated is not even always valid

and more, no doubt. Probably you will be frustrated if you try to use this software, unless you are a bit of a perl hacker.

The shell script provided is for unix, though conversion to MS-DOS is straightforward -- add "perl " before each script name and replace $1 with %1. I use the scripts under MS-DOS as well as linux regularly.