This is religion.200, a group of four religious works marked up for electronic publication from publicly available sources. The texts were originally marked up (1992) as an exercise in SGML DTD and style sheet design, and in 1996 were released along with a companion Shakespeare set as the earliest examples of real documents marked up in XML. The current distribution conforms to the XML 1.0 Recommendation released February 8, 1998.
It has been my intention from the beginning that this set should always be made available as a set rather than as individual works. Each of the four "testaments" in the set now bears the following notices:
SGML version by Jon Bosak, 1992-1994
XML version by Jon Bosak, 1996-1998
The XML markup and added material in this version are Copyright © 1998 Jon Bosak
The set of which this work is a part may freely be distributed on condition that it not be modified or altered in any way. The individual works making up the set -- The Old Testament, The New Testament, The Quran, and The Book of Mormon -- cannot be distributed separately without violating the terms under which the set is made available.
Version 2.00 differs significantly from the previous release, version 1.10. Some new material has been added, and the markup and associated DTD have been substantially revised.
The most important change is the removal of verse numbers. The previous markup was designed simply to delimit the original ASCII texts I started with in 1992. This new version is intended to exercise the ability of style sheets to supply basic features such as generated numbers and tables of contents. Since the particular texts making up the set are taken as canonical and unchanging, verse numbers and tables of contents can be generated, so there is no need to include them in the markup. DSSSL stylesheets are included with the texts themselves to demonstrate the concept. Supporting files needed to generate RTF output using the style sheets in conjunction with the Jade DSSSL engine are also provided.
This distribution includes the following files and directories:
religion.htm this file
vs a bash script for validating a file as SGML
vx a bash script for validating a file as XML
rtfn a bash script for generating a normal RTF file
rtfl a bash script for generating a large-type RTF file
buildall a bash script for validating all of the XML files in
the set and building both RTF versions of each file
common directory containing all the style-sheet files, etc.:
catalog SGML Open (OASIS) catalog for public identifiers
base.dsl the parts common to all of the style sheets
p1.dsl wrapper file for the one-level style sheet
t1.dsl parts peculiar to the one-level style sheet
p2.dsl wrapper file for the two-level style sheet
t2.dsl parts peculiar to the two-level style sheet
tstmt.dtd DTD for testaments
dsssl.dtd DSSSL DTD
fot.dtd FOT (flow object tree) DTD
style-sheet.dtd DTD for DSSSL style sheets
xml.dcl XML SGML declaration
xml.soc XML catalog
bom
bom.xml The Book of Mormon
nt
nt.xml The New Testament (KJV)
ot
ot.xml The Old Testament (KJV)
quran
quran.xml The Quran (trans. by M. H. Shakir)
The files in this set were built and tested in Windows 95 using scripts running under the Gnu bash shell. They should work equally well using DOS batch files, but I don't have the patience to deal with them. The same installation has also been tested under Solaris (using ksh instead of bash) and should work with other versions of Unix as well.
Assuming that nsgmls (part of the Jade distribution) has been installed and is in the search path, the scripts named vs and vx are called from the parent directory like this:
vs ot vx ot
In these examples, the vs script performs a validity check of the ot/ot.xml file as an SGML file, and the vx script performs a validity check of the same file as an XML file. Note that both scripts change the values of SP environment variables.
Assuming that Jade (http://www.jclark.com/jade) has been installed and is in the search path, the scripts named rtfn and rtfl are called from the parent directory like this:
rtfn nt 2 rtfl quran 1
In these examples, the rtfn script calls jade using the style sheet for two-level testaments to produce a normal-type RTF version of nt/nt.xml, and the rtfl script calls jade using the style sheet for one-level testaments to produce a large-type RTF version of quran/quran.xml. A one-level testament such as the Quran has just one level of containment (the sura) above the verse level. Two-level testaments such as the Old Testament and the New Testament have two levels of containment (books and chapters) above the verse level. Note that the Book of Mormon contains both chapters and suras.
The buildall script calls vs, vx, rtfn, and rtfl to validate and make both RTF versions of all four XML files.
The style sheets provided in this distribution produce results that leave a lot to be desired, especially in the areas of column-balancing and TOC formatting. This is due partly to limitations in RTF, partly to limitations in Jade, partly to limitations in my skill, and partly to a desire to keep them simple. They are not intended as examples of fine quality typography but rather as demonstrations of basic concepts using freely available tools. It is my intention to use these style sheets as the basis for explorations into XSL as that standard begins to solidify.
Jon Bosak