Before you even begin to consider what the OSIS requirements are for updating the WLC module, you would need to gain a detailed understanding of the OSIS markup that was used by Osk in the module and to recognize the mistake that he made with regard to the spurious space that was included after every MAQAF, as well as to appreciate why this came about through his relying upon a script of his own that made no special provision for the morph segments that ended with a MAQAF.

My worry is that by jumping in with only the experience so far of tackling updates to works much simpler than the WLC in terms of markup, you could end up with an OSIS file that is even less satisfactory than was used for the last release.

The issues relating to Normalization of Biblical Hebrew are too complex to describe here in these comments. There is much more to be learned, my friend. See (e.g.) note 3 under 

https://wiki.crosswire.org/Encoding#Normalization

The note refers to the more detailed coverage in 

https://www.sbl-site.org/Fonts/SBLHebrewUserManual1.5x.pdf

There are lines in the file TanachHeader.xml that refer to "with exceptions set by the Donnelly/Kirk algorithm". The surname Kirk is that of Peter Kirk who in earlier years did some valuable research on how Unicode Hebrew vowel accents & cantillation points should be ordered for the text to display correctly when rendered by the smart fonts that were then available.

I have never been formally trained in the original Biblical languages, so I approached it with some trepidation when the opportunity was presented to get involved in a related but separate project in 2014. I came to the task as an engineer rather than as a linguist.

btw. It was I who persuaded Andrew West to provide the option in BabelPad for the custom normalization of Hebrew. He already had such an option for Tibetan.

With regards to these Ancient Hebrew Biblical texts, we need to take steps to ensure that DomCox does not simply apply the current "turnkey" solution for releasing a module, by running the confmaker script, etc.

When the module is built using osis2mod, we should ensure that it is done using the -N command line switch.

  -N do not normalize to NFC

Otherwise, the default normalization to NFC would be applied, which is not what is required.

Thank you David, for all this information. I'll take time to read it well. For now I'm busy and I wait first for the other updates.

Cyrille,

Just to inform you that I am working on the XML files for WLC v4.20 with a view towards conversion to OSIS, albeit currently using IMP format as an intermediate stage for easier human reading and analysis.

I've essentially picked up again from where I left off in 2014 with a bespoke TextPipe filter.

David

• aleppo
• mapm
• sp
• spdss
• spe
• spmt
• spvar
• wlc