Re: [sword-devel] Bible Software Review

Thu, 01 May 2008 00:01:30 -0700

Yes, BPBible is a work in progress, but for version 0.2, it looks pretty good to me in Windows.

I understand where you are coming from with regular expressions. I don't use regular expressions either, but that's because for sophisticated searches I use Libronix because the texts are tagged morphologically and the Libronix Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic search dialogs build something akin to regular expressions for me. I haven't tried doing this kind of searching in any of the Sword front-ends, but the potential is there, especially with the MorphGNT module, which includes both parsing and lemma tagging. Let's say you want to find all aorist, 3rd person, singular forms of the verb αγαπαω (agapao, to love) that also have θεος (theos, God) in the nominative case within three words. Try to do that with a basic search (I haven't tried building a regex to do that search, but I imagine you could build one to get you close to that). Regular expressions represent exegetical potential, but the average exegete won't take time to learn them. I am concerned about exegetes in the developing world who can't afford Logos but want to do more sophisticated morphological analysis. For myself, if the WLC ever gets morphological tagging, I'd start trying to do regex searches just to save myself the step of having to fire up my virtual machine and open Logos. I would say that until MorphGNT makes it out of beta and the WLC gets morphological and lemma tagging, this is not a big issue. But down the road it could make Sword quite attractive for people working in the biblical languages.

Daniel

Jonathan Morgan wrote: 
On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 4:03 PM, Daniel Owens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
  
 I took a look at BPBible, and it is indeed fairly feature rich and pleasing
to the eye. I especially like the way it handles looking up dictionary
entries. I would use it regularly if:


Fonts could be set by language or module,
Bibles could be viewed in parallel, either BibleTime or BibleDesktop
fashion, and

and the Linux installation were a bit easier (I got stuck when trying to
install the swig bindings). The project has made a strong start. The search
dialog is pretty sharp, though average users aren't familiar with regular
expressions. A regular _expression_ builder dialog would be fantastic. The
method that commentaries are linked to the Bible text is great.
    

Bear in mind that it is still very much a work in progress, but
thankyou for the comments.  I will agree that Linux installation may
be hard, and I'm sure that that will be addressed in some way in later
releases.  However, I don't agree with the regular _expression_
suggestion.  It is true that most users aren't familiar with regular
expressions.  However, regular expressions aren't a feature that most
users will need to use.  I understand regular expressions well, and
search the Bible frequently, and yet I have never had cause to use
regular expressions.  I suspect that only people who understand
regular expressions well will actually want to use them.  Most Bible
searches are satisfied by multi word or phrase search, which is quick
and easy and anyone who has used Google can understand.

Jon

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