Possible support for sword module add ins?

[BenedictHW]

Dear Alphapapa,

Many thanks for this package, it's really helpful! (Your org-web-tools is also a lifesaver)

Best thing about .org format bibles is that backlinks (in the context of org-brain or org-roam) means when I view a verse or chapter I can see where else it was referenced.

I hope I'm not being too greedy when I ask if it's possible to support .bdt files. Ex. The module I have in mind is from: http://crosswire.org/sword/modules/ModInfo.jsp?modName=AquinasSummaTheologica&tester=true&beta=true

An excerpt:
<title type="x-h4" osisID="ii.i.i.i.p0.1">Whether, besides philosophy, any further doctrine is required?</title>

<p osisID="ii.i.i.i.p1"/>

<p osisID="ii.i.i.i.p2">Objection 1: It seems that, besides philosophical science, we have no need of any further knowledge. For man should not seek to know what is above reason: "Seek not the things that are too high for thee" (<reference type="annotateRef" osisID="ii.i.i.i.p2.1" osisRef="Bible.VUL:Ecclus.3.22">Ecclus. 3:22</reference>). But whatever is not above reason is fully treated of in philosophical science. Therefore any other knowledge besides philosophical science is superfluous.</p>

I checked through some other sword modules and it does seem the majority are in .bzs, .bzv etc. So I understand that my use case is uncommon. I confess I do not have any elisp skills, so perhaps you are the right person to ask. I did try dtk.el from this issue #4 List related projects including dtk, but it seems like .bdt doesn't show up when using their select module function.

It's no big deal if it's not possible. Still happy to have the content, having nice headers is really just a nice extra. Thanks for your time.

Best,

Hanshen

[BenedictHW]

Update:

Preamble: I'm not a programmer by trade so my band aid solution is by no means the best or even complete.

I am currently running Spacemacs 0.300 on WSL2. So here are my steps:

1. Make sure to use M-x find-file-literally to open up the .bdt file if it's really large

2. For my particular use case I find it necessary to divide up the file (Summa Theologiae) into smaller chunks -- around 2-5mb -- otherwise Spacemacs slows down unbearably.

3. Now I would like org-mode headlines. However the <title> tags in the .bdt are sometimes annoyingly preceded by whitespace characters. I couldn't find a way to shift a string back one character during find and replace.

4. So instead I intend to export the excerpt from .org to .html via org-export-dispatch. Before doing that I use find and replace to change all occurrences of the title tag to

:%s/<title/#+HTML: <h2/g
:%s#</title>#</h2>#g

5. Taking the .html output and then using pandoc to convert back to org-mode

$ pandoc -s example.html -t org -o example.org

6. Final output looks like this:
   
   There still exists tags, but I'm willing to live with it for now. I'm sure there exists a better, quicker way to sanitize the text.

[alphapapa]

Hi Hanshen,

Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad these tools are useful to you.

This package uses the output of the diatheke command line tool; it does not parse any SWORD formats directly. If diatheke doesn't handle a certain file format, you might need to upgrade your SWORD installation, or maybe they haven't updated it for that format. I'm not familiar with the BDT format. (I don't know much about any of the SWORD formats, because they are opaque, documented almost exclusively by the source code of their libraries that parse and generate them. That's why I use the output of diatheke, which is their own tool that uses their libraries to parse and reformat them.)

Alternatively, if it's an XML-native format as you seem to indicate, it shouldn't be too difficult to use Elisp XML libraries to parse it and generate the output you need. You can find some XML tools here: https://github.com/alphapapa/emacs-package-dev-handbook#xml--html

See also this other repo of mine: https://github.com/alphapapa/sword-converter If you are brave and patient enough, you might be able to use the SWORD libraries directly to generate suitable output, similar to how I did there. But I can't help you with that, as it's mostly a mystery to me as well.

I wish the SWORD project would use standard, open formats, like maybe compressed SQLite databases. They had their reasons for using proprietary formats years ago, when disk space and bandwidth were much more at a premium, but I think those formats are more of a hindrance now, as is shown by our attempting to use them.