.rtf, .doc., or .htm file to SwordSearcher module: best practice

[Eric]

Although I have lots of experience with the user Bible modules, I have never used Forge for making a user book (that I recall).

I have a Rich Text File (.rtf) file that includes some images that I'd like to make into a SwordSearcher user book. I'm looking for advice so that it's done properly, and efficiently. I think I know about the naming of chapters or sections starting with "0", etc., in order to preserve proper order, but here are my initial questions.

I decided to use Word 2003 in my Windows Virtual Machine to do this. I tried saving in Web Format (.htm) and Web Format Filtered (.htm), thinking that it would insert formatting tags for bold and italics, etc., but it didn't. What's the best way to go from a formatted .doc file to a formatted user book? When I copied and pasted from Word into Notepad++, it seemed as if none of the formatting was preserved. Is there a way to take some format document (Word or otherwise) and just paste it into a pre-Forge document? I took formatted Word content and pasted it directly into a SS module (by-passing Forge). That was not acceptable: far too many stray tags, etc. in the code version.

Advice anyone? Workflow?

 

[Eric]

Another question: how do I put in the footnotes like are in Gill's commentary? I only have couple in this module, but it'd be nice to do it well.

Edit: another question: When in code mode how do you code in an indentation at the beginning of a paragraph without just typing in spaces? Seems to be that if I switch to Design Mode and do it, SS adds a lot of code just to do that. Is all of that needed?
Here is what plain text looks like when I switch to Design Mode:

When I add an indentation, it goes to this:

Looks to me that some of that stuff is totally irrelevant, especially the "charset=windows-1252".

 

[Brandon Staggs]

You're gonna need to brush up on HTML if you want to be able to do this. Exporting to html from doc is a good first step. If it did not preserve your bold/etc formatting something went wrong.

The thing is, Forge is really intended for processing large amounts of text, and presumes that you'll be doing pre-processing on your own. If you aren't going to be using a script or macro of some kind to sort through the text before going into forge, it may be just as easy to copy and paste entries into the editor in SwordSearcher.

The biggest thing to remember is that Forge expects each entry to be a self-contained HTML document. Header details like the meta tags can usually be ignored, it just depends on the HTML. You don't have to have fully formed HTML documents in each entry, but each entry is processed as if it were an HTML document.

Footnotes are handled with HTML anchors.

 

[Eric]

Thanks for the info. Well, what I've done so far today is paste into SS directly. I found that the e-text I had was OCR'ed, so it's got tons of irrelevant tags besides the good ones. It's a time-consuming process, and I'm not sure I'll do another one after this one. This way I don't have to (or don't get to) learn HTML.