How to display the original formatting of a version?

[swestfall]

Is there a way to make BibleWorks display results using the same text layout as the editors of a printed version used? For example, the editors of BHS chose to lay out the Hebrew of the Psalms as poetry (which of course it is), and the editors of many English translations of the Psalms do the same in their printed editions. However, as far as I can tell BibleWorks pays no attention to those formatting decisions embodied in the printed editions of the versions that it offers, and it just displays as much text as it can per line, totally obliterating the poetic layout.

Is there an option that I have not yet found that will tell BibleWorks to use a version's own text layout decisions when displaying that version? (If not, it would be a welcome enhancement!)

Thanks.

Steve

[Joe Fleener]

Yes, this is a very common request, and I agree it would be nice.

However, it is really not BibleWorks.

The data BibleWorks receives from the various sources does not contain any identifying code to reveal genre, paragraph markers, etc. BibleWorks displays the text they receive.

So either, the holders of the text need to improve their data to include this information, or BibleWorks has to go back through the text to add it, or a group of BibleWorks users who really want this can go back through the text and add this data.

There is not a real easy solution.

[pastor-steve]

I'm not sure how it could be possible that BibleWorks doesn't receive formatting information in their Bible versions.

1) Quickverse had this in 1999 when I used it.
2) Visit www.biblegateway.com to see properly formatted text.
3) I know that the NET Bible has it. I used the preprocessor to add the NET Bible to BW5 as a user databse and I saw the codes for line breaks in the raw text. I assumed that BW6 would support them when NET became a native databse.

I suspect that the real answer is that multi-verse mode is a bit of a second class citizen in BibleWorks. My understanding is that BW was designed to look at one verse at a time so formatting wasn't a big issue.

BibleWorks is extremely useful as it is. It would be even more useful for study in English if it preserved formatting. Actually, I would also appreciate the italics that the NA27 has in Greek for quotations from the OT.

Steve

[swestfall]

The WORDsearch software that is (was?) distributed on CD with purchases of the ESV printed edition displays the correct formatting, so at least some vendors are getting a file that has the breaks in the correct places.

[Columcille]

I don't know if there would be a remotely simple way to do this, but the ESV website has a web service which makes the ESV text available to individual websites. The ESV text is formatted using CSS tags, and using their CSS stylesheet the text can display on a website much as it does in any printed ESV Bible.

Would there be some way to generate a formatted Bibleworks module this way? There could be some other issues with the restrictions in place for the web service itself, but it might be something worth considering for someone more ambitious than I.