Ante Nicene Fathers Greek-English

[Dave Hindley]

Hello,

I recently updated to BW8 , and perhaps my blood sugar is too low, but I cannot seem to find any searchable texts of Early Church Fathers such as Irenaeus or Tertullian. It seems that these were available in BW6.

Now I am aware that the Early Church Fathers series "edited by Schaff" (actually, he only edited the Post Nicene volumes, Donaldson & Roberts edited the Ante Nicene volumes) is in a kind of module from CCEL, but it is not the same.

What's up??

PS: Why hasn't anyone created modules with the Greek & Latin texts of these Church fathers? It seems that these sorts of things are available online, so licensing surely is not out of the question. What I wouldn't give to search Irenaeus, Tertullian, Eusebius, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, etc, in English, Greek & Latin through BibleWorks!

Dave

[Michael Hanel]

Hello,

I recently updated to BW8 , and perhaps my blood sugar is too low, but I cannot seem to find any searchable texts of Early Church Fathers such as Irenaeus or Tertullian. It seems that these were available in BW6.

Now I am aware that the Early Church Fathers series "edited by Schaff" (actually, he only edited the Post Nicene volumes, Donaldson & Roberts edited the Ante Nicene volumes) is in a kind of module from CCEL, but it is not the same.

What's up??

PS: Why hasn't anyone created modules with the Greek & Latin texts of these Church fathers? It seems that these sorts of things are available online, so licensing surely is not out of the question. What I wouldn't give to search Irenaeus, Tertullian, Eusebius, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, etc, in English, Greek & Latin through BibleWorks!

Dave

There is an English module like that on the BibleWorks blog (look under Church Fathers). Is that what you meant? That's the only thing I'm aware of. A few of us started that project but quit it after we learned that the Church Fathers would be available in another form.

As far as adding the Greek and Latin texts, by all means I would love it. I'm even willing to do it. But here's what you need to do, find versions of these Fathers and post the links here. What I have found so far is that where versions do exist, they are still copyrighted (and thus cannot be used freely) or they are in a form that is too difficult to convert. But I would love to be corrected. Show me some of the stuff you're talking about.

[Kimba]

I might help with a project like this. For fun I once wrote a program that read the entire NT (from BW) placed every word in the database in unicode than I cut and pasted an unaccented Greek text and let my tool covert it to the accented. Yes, not every word converted but the vast majority did and all those that did had to be processed and then the text was accented.

The other issues that has to be dealt with are those words that are the same but different accenting. But those can be tagged and processed by a someone.

[Michael Hanel]

It would be a fun (but difficult) project indeed. But like I said, the problem is that the available texts (that I've found) really aren't all that available. You can use some of them on the free version of the TLG, but you can't use their versions because they hold the copyright on the digitizing of the texts. You can find PDFs of Migne texts but a) those texts are ancient and hardly ever the best critical text available and b) it's a nightmare to try to OCR or type from the quality of PDFs that are available. And if I'm going to go blind, I'd like to do it using a quality text. And there are at least a couple of sites that provide PDF of the Migne text in nice Greek, but generally they seem to indicate that the text they are providing is that of TLG, not their own.

One could use Roger Pearse's website to get Tertullian made into a proper Latin version, but I must admit, because its Tertullian, I've never really been that excited to start such a project.

So that's why I said, I would be glad to learn where texts are available that can be freely used!

[bink]

Michael,

All these user-created versions under the BW Blog- are they found in BW8 or 9 or extra's we can add to our database for use? In other words, the many you've seemed to post/list there yourself... are they offered b/c we don't have them in the BW program?

I've added a few (Homer, Demosthenes, etc) at least for the experience of trying and learning how to do this. Or this Pearse file 'Other Early Church Father's'... already in BW8 and I just haven't got to it yet?

Thanks, John

[Michael Hanel]

Bink, in general the files on the BibleWorks blog are not found in any of the versions of BibleWorks. There are exceptions to this, but we try to identify them. For instance offering Tregelles in BW9 is an exception to this. So you wouldn't need that if you're using BW9. We haven't deleted files that are included in BW generally because not all people will upgrade and the user files are meant for users whether or not they make it into a BW package.

[bink]

Michael,

I hope this install practicing is an example of what is true for all files I hope to figure out and add to my BW8 program.

Here's what I did: from a list of several like cdg.ddf, cdl.ddf, cre.ddf... I chose and downloaded and saved the anf.ddf file (Ante-NF). Went to the Version Database Compiler and followed steps (under #1 DDF... placed c:\program files\bibleworks 8\userdb\anf.ddf and then under #2 Database Raw put c:\program files\bibleworks 8\userdb\anf.txt, checked "install", clicked "compile") and it shows '0 verses, 1 ch, 0 bks, 0 blanks, etc) 'database has all blank verses.' For that matter, then closing and reopening BW I don't even know where to then look if it were even in there!

I'm probably missing just a small divot of one of the steps if not simply misunderstanding. Wish I wasn't pc illiterate and I know this is not worth your time. I will follow the advice of 'read BW help files' as my due diligence homework. I'm obviously missing something and if possible send me to a 'help link' to figure it out. Though the directions on the Blog don't seem to help me with this problem.

John

[Michael Hanel]

Some files are easier to install than others. There are two different kinds of Bible versions on the blogs (we started doing them one way and then sort of changed and haven't gone back and re-did the old files). The first kind is like this where you actually have to run them through the compiler yourself. The other kind is already compiled. Those just need to be saved in the \databases\ folder.

And then there are all the module files. Those have a special quirk caused by Windows where the files need to be manually unblocked in order to be used.

Anyway, on your problem. You'll be happy to know I'm quite sure the problem is a user error. When you unzipped the files from ANF.zip, where exactly did you place them? Based on what you said, you should have unzipped the entire zip file to the \userdb\ folder. After having unzipped the entire folder there, you start the Version Database Compiler. Navigate to open the anf.ddf and then make sure you double check the next box so that it knows where your anf.txt file is. If you've tried that and it's still not working I'm not entirely sure. Just to make sure I just downloaded the files myself and tried it out and it worked just fine.

If you still haven't got it let me know and I'll have a plan B.

[Mark Eddy]

On thing you have to beware of with the user database compiler .ddf files is that they list the location of the corresponding database raw text file. If the files were posted back in BW6 or BW7, they will look for the .txt file in the BibleWorks 6 or 7 folder. If you actually have the text files in the BW8 folder (or BW9 folder), then you have to change the location of the .txt file in the .ddf file in line 2 of the Version Database Compiler. I have made the mistake of using an older .ddf file and not checking where it put the location of the .txt file. And I wondered why it did not compile: the program was looking in a location where I had not put the file. As long as you make sure your .ddf file locates the .txt file where it actually is, you should not have a problem installing it (if you remember to check the box "install after compiling"--I have made the mistake of compiling without checking that box and wondered why I could not find the file).
Mark Eddy

[Dave Hindley]

There is an English module like that on the BibleWorks blog (look under Church Fathers). Is that what you meant? That's the only thing I'm aware of. A few of us started that project but quit it after we learned that the Church Fathers would be available in another form.

As far as adding the Greek and Latin texts, by all means I would love it. I'm even willing to do it. But here's what you need to do, find versions of these Fathers and post the links here. What I have found so far is that where versions do exist, they are still copyrighted (and thus cannot be used freely) or they are in a form that is too difficult to convert. But I would love to be corrected. Show me some of the stuff you're talking about.

Michael,

I would recommend contacting Ben C Smith, who has ferreted out a good number of unicode Greek texts of various fathers for his "Text Excavation" webpage. His contact info is at www.textexcavation.com.

For instance, Eusebius' Church History is available in Unicode Greek here:

http://users.uoa.gr/~nektar/orthodox...a_historia.htm

The Unicode Greek of Eusebius' Church History, Preparation and Demonstration are all available at a French language site, here. Ben also seems to have figured out how to convert various fonts into unicode.

Irenaeus' Against Heresies is both Latin and Greek Fragments in W Wigan Harvey's Sancti Irenaei episcopi Lugdunensis Libros quinque adversus haereses (2 volumes). Unfortunately it is in image format only, but it seems that at very least the Latin, and perhaps even the Greek, can be scanned using something like ABBYY FineReader 10.

Vol 1 Vol 2

Hope this helps. A lot of the newer unicode resources have appeared in the last 3 years or so.

Dave Hindley