Josh does good work, but his focus is on a "basic" module that is pretty much the same for ES as it is for TW. What I'm producing is more intensively specialized in taking advantage of TW's hyperlinking capability (which I'm told ES lacks, but I have only limited personal knowledge of ES, so I'm going on what I've been told). The following image illustrates what I'm doing, that cannot be done with ES:DarrelW wrote:So how do these ICCNT modules differ from the ones Josh is producing?
Darrel
Three things to note. First are the three red arrows to "see on.." cross references. When you mouse over a link like this, it will pop up the relevant comment on the cited scripture, not the scripture text. The popup for "2:10" is illustrated in the example, though I've moved it from its original location so it wouldn't cover up other things I wanted to show with this image. This is what the author intended...for you to read what he wrote on another verse, rather than repeat himself in this verse. Most scholarly commentaries have these kinds of internal cross references. Plummer's Luke has hundreds of them. You will not see this in Josh's modules (which is not a slight, because he is producing for both ES and TW, and ES does not support this kind of hypertext popup).
Second, with some purple arrows I've pointed to some possibilities for future hypertext links. Not all sources will be readily available for something like this, but I believe, for example, that modules exist for Edersheim's books, so it should be possible to link to the cited section with a hyperlink. That's a project for another day (or year).
Third, I would just draw attention to the peculiar style of scripture references in this commentary, where Plummer usually omits the book reference for references to Luke. In the ES module for ICCNT, these are unlinked (I think the term is "tooltipped," so these are "not tooltipped"). There are thousands of such references in Plummer's commentary on Luke, which I've ("painstakingly") implemented here as hyperlinks. As I continue to proof what I've done, I see where I've missed some, and will continue to correct them as I come across them. But I'll move on to another book, and updates will occur when I have them all done and can link them back together into a single multivolume set.
But the type of work here is just more intensive than what Josh produces, and takes much more time. I do not doubt he could do what I am doing, and probably do some of it more efficiently because of his superior regex/macro abilities. But I am not sure how you can automate some of this, especially the internal cross references, because the style of reference not only varies from author to author, but some authors do not always follow a consistent style. My approach is to go through verse by verse, reading the commentary, and when I see a reference like the three in the example above, I hyperlink them. Slow, but effective. And it is quite educational and enlightening to go through a commentary this way, verse by verse, from start to finish. It is not the way commentaries are usually read.
Basil
