Are there any XSL stylesheets allowing transformation of OSIS Bibles into
XSL-FO or even other XML dialects which are easier to transform from further
e.g. docbook?

I have been looking pretty much everywhere on the web, without success. One guy
advertised here on the mailinglist 2 years ago that he was working on such
stylesheets, but his website is now defunct...

Thanks a lot 

Peter

[...]

Peter,

We have a number of XSL transformations that produce XSL-FO.

Can you provide a few more specifics regarding what you are trying to 
accomplish?

Todd Tillinghast

Peter von Kaehne wrote:[...]

Thanks Todd,

I have - with the help of your tools and of Teus Benschop's Bibledit
worked a long time on getting a working sword module of the Tarjumeh-ye
Ghadim of the Farsi Bible. Long time - largely due to my initial gross
lack of understanding and my tendency of starting and dropping things
until I understand them better. Only now am I in coming into a position
of knowing what I am actually doing.

I do hope that I can bring my now ready module into the crosswire
repository once I have full agreement/clarification re copyrights etc.

Anyway, now that I have a working Osis text and a swordmodule, and now
that I have learned a bit more about XML and XSL I am simply trying to
explore the options of OSIS.  I was really suprised to see that despite
being presented as the ideal format for all kinds of transformations and
publication methods there is actually very little published in any
accessible form, ready for experimentation.

What I would currently really like to see is whether OSIS to XSL-FO
produces any significant advantages in terms of handling, flexibility
etc over Bibledit's process of getting USFM to XSL-FO. I presume not,
but only by trying will I know.

Further I am interested in seeing whether getting a text from OSIS
directly to docbook gives any added advantages dt the huge number of
open source tools dealing with DocBook. I have tried using Bibledit's
export into OpenOffice's ODF then into SXW to get to Docbook, but found
that in the process the whole XML structure gets increasingly flattened
and becomes unusable once docbook is reached. Given that many of OSIS
basic structures should export well to Docbook, a direct way via XSLT
would be great.

So , no specific aims at the moment, but an attempt to test out the
limits of the medium and some degree of disappointment that such an
important format has so few tools openly published (Notwithstanding your
great offer which I am more than happy to accept)

Peter

Todd Tillinghast wrote:[...][...][...]

Peter,

There are two factors that will likely influence how you proceed.

1) How complex your text is.  If you text is simple "Book/Chapter/Verse"
with no paragraphs or is a simple "Book/Section/Paragraph" structure
with chapters and verses overlapping then your task is easier, but if
you text has nested structures like the NIV or CEV the rendering
processor has to account for the added complexity.

2) How much control do you want over the output.
   a) Do you want to merge your scripture text with other resources
(study notes, cross-references not in the base text, etc...)?
   b) Do you want to render scripture portions?
   c) Do you want to render parallel and/or diglot editions?

If you are looking to render just a simple scripture text current XSL-FO 
is not a bad way to go.  The current drawback is that you cannot do 
manual adjustments to the rendered product (we are in the process of 
finalizing our XSL-FO rendering engine which includes direct editing of 
the source XML document and manual adjustments to the both the 
transformation as well as the rendered XSL-FO all within a WYSIWYG 
environment).

The other issue with XSL-FO is that the spec does not allow you to have
footnotes that follow one after another on the same line.  You can work
around this with markers but the you are left with a fixed size space at
the bottom of all pages.  (We are adding an extension our XSL-FO 
rendering engine that allows for footnotes that follow one after another 
on the same line/block.)

The XSL transformations we have written over the past three plus years 
do provide a significant degree of control over a wide variety of style 
factors.

Todd Tillinghast

Peter von Kaehne wrote:[...][...]
>>> Are there any XSL stylesheets allowing transformation of OSIS
Bibles
>>> into XSL-FO or even other XML dialects which are easier to
transform
>>> from further e.g. docbook?
>>>
>>> I have been looking pretty much everywhere on the web, without
>>> success. One guy advertised here on the mailinglist 2 years ago
that
>>> he was working on such stylesheets, but his website is now
defunct...
>>>
>>> Thanks a lot
>>> Peter
>>>
>>>
>>>   [...][...]