Could anyone give some tips on module creation?

I

ifbaptist

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I've been a "casual" user of SS for a couple of years now and I think for the money it's absolutely great. I recommend it to everyone at my church.

I'm at the point now where I want to start making some of my own modules to add to it.

I have a few resources as PDF's that are fairly large that I would like to convert and add as modules. Is there a guide somewhere on how to start doing this?

I've downloaded Forge and read through the SS 6 appendix for formatting and looked at the short Forge manual. Does anyone have suggestions on how to somehow automate some of the bulkier formatting work that will need to be done to get it in a good format for Forge?

I'll have to bruch up on my HTML but that part I'm pretty confident about remembering. Would MS Access or Excel be useful in formatting large sections of text at once?

Any help would be appreciated. I couldn't find any recent posts related to this topic. Thanks.

By the way some of the resources I have are public domain but others are not. Is it appropriate for me to add copyrighted material to SS as long as I don't distribute it and I already own it legally in electronic format?
 
Each project is different. If you have text in PDF format, you might first want to see if you can convert it to HTML with a word processor -- sometimes you can automate the reformatting of paragraphs that way.

But the easiest way to import a PDF into SwordSearcher is usually just copy+paste into the user editor. Depending on the source PDF, you may or may not need to reformat anything.

If you have a lot of entries to do, Forge can be much faster, but only if you have a way of bringing the text into suitable text/html form. You could use a WYSIWYG HTML editor, like Dreamweaver (or any number of other HTML editors) to paste text in from the PDF, but you still need to take the HTML code and put it in a plain text file with the entry markers as described in the Forge documentation.

ifbaptist said:
By the way some of the resources I have are public domain but others are not. Is it appropriate for me to add copyrighted material to SS as long as I don't distribute it and I already own it legally in electronic format?
Click to expand...

It really depends on the specific publication. A lot of books I own state in the copyright section that placing the text in a computer retrieval system is prohibited -- you'll need to take this on a case-by-case basis. I am no lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but, I would think that as long as you are only doing it for your own use and do not keep copies of text on your PC that you no longer have in print, you should be fine.

If the text was originally published before 1925 or so, you can do whatever you want with it (the text itself, that is).
 
I've used Forge a few times to create modules, but for 99.9% of the modules I've created, using SwordSearcher's built-in tools are fastest and easiest. Bible modules need to be created using Forge. Forge is a wonderful program, but it has more power than I need for my little modules.

I've used material from several different formats to make modules - some text converts just fine, but if the text isn't coming out right when you save it in your module, try pasting it as plain text (it's an option in the right-click menu) and then you can use the editor to manipulate the text.

The editor is pretty much wysiwyg (what you see is what you get), so you don't have to learn a bunch of html or other code (which can be frustrating if you just want to get your module done and move on). Although, you can go to the code tab in the editor and use your own html code if you need to manually tweak some text effect.

You can rename entries using the main menu, too, if you change your mind about a title later. (This was a feature Brandon added for those of us who change our minds a lot. Thanks, Brandon!) :)
 
Thanks for the info. Here's what I've figured out so far.

  • Copying the pdf text into Word (Office 2007)
  • Find and replace the format of the scripture references to be SS friendly. Includes changing the long - to a regular -for verses to pop up in SS.
  • To get rid of page numbers and other unwanted lines I replaced all of the ^p (backwards P end line codes) with a | and saved it as a txt file. (seemed necessary because the pdf has the text in double columns on each page)
  • That way I can use Excel to open it up and I can sort out all of the page numbers and other unwanted lines of text much quicker than doing it all manually.
Well that's where I'm at. I'm going to download Seamonkey from Mozilla's website to edit HTML and check the formatting later on down the road.

I haven't figure out yet how to link the parts of the commentary with the verses in SS. (clicking on Jn 3:16 to show the comment for Jn 3:16 in the commentary tab like the others)

It may sound silly but I'm enjoying the challenge so far. If anyone has advice on something I should be doing differently please let me know.

Thanks for the advice so far.
 
ifbaptist said:
I haven't figure out yet how to link the parts of the commentary with the verses in SS. (clicking on Jn 3:16 to show the comment for Jn 3:16 in the commentary tab like the others)
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Take a look at the SS help topic "links, Swordsearcher" for a list of ways to links things. For the commentary to reference a note on a verse you would make a link in your comment like this:

<a href="swordsearcher://cmty+YourCmt/ge1.1">See my comment on Ge 1.1</a>

Where YourCmt is the name of your commentary. If you are referencing the same commentary your can omit the +YourCmt.
 
In addition to the code method wsbones pointed out, in the editor you can use the Insert menu to insert links to other entries (in the same or a different module). It also lets you insert links to dynamic search results.
 
If it is appropriate to ask here, could someone give me guidance as to how hebrew text might be pasted into a book being created from a PDF online file? Thanks in advance.
 
Ken Zitsch said:
If it is appropriate to ask here, could someone give me guidance as to how hebrew text might be pasted into a book being created from a PDF online file? Thanks in advance.
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Assuming you are using SwordSearcher 6, which supports Unicode:

If the PDF file has the Hebrew text encoded in Unicode, all you have to do is copy and paste -- nothing special required.

If it is not, then you may need to apply font formatting after you paste into the editor. You will need to find out what font is being used to display the Hebrew text in the PDF file.
 
Thanks Brandon :)

I hate to be a bother to you, I am right clicking on the PDF file all over the place here, and I cannot find anything that will help me determine what font is being used throughout the document. I am using Swordsearcher 6 (Excellent software by the way). I am starting to get into this module creation business (as there are a wealth of online resurces). Is there something that I must do or a procedure to follow in determining what font is in view in PDF's. Thank you again
 
Ken Zitsch said:
Thanks Brandon :)

I hate to be a bother to you, I am right clicking on the PDF file all over the place here, and I cannot find anything that will help me determine what font is being used throughout the document. I am using Swordsearcher 6 (Excellent software by the way). I am starting to get into this module creation business (as there are a wealth of online resurces). Is there something that I must do or a procedure to follow in determining what font is in view in PDF's. Thank you again
Click to expand...

Happy to help.

You should be able to see a list in Adobe Reader by going to File > Document Properties -- there should be a Fonts tab. Once you figure out which font is being used, you will probably need to Google it to download and install it. It can get a little confusing because there are multiple ways Hebrew has been encoded in non-Unicode documents.
 
Thanks Brandon

I realized it wasn't a PDF file. It was in Internet Explorer (look all the same to me). I found the document properties under Edit. Now I just have to locate the font online. I assume that all I have to do is just download the font and it will just "be" there?

Gonna make a tech out of me yet.
 
Wow, what an AWSOME question, and many helpful answers! I cannot even remember when I first started using Sword Searcher, maybe ver.3?

It is tremendous and I am hooked, I love it! But this is the frist time (I lie not) that I even attempted to "add" anothing of my own notes....

What an awsome resource~! Thank you Brandon and all!

:D

I guess this counts as my annual posting here LOL!
 
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