Theological Markup Language (ThML)
This document describes Theological Markup Language, a new markup
language that is being used to mark up texts for the Christian
Classics Ethereal Library and other projects.
This XML application can be thought of as HTML with additions for
electronic books and rich digital libraries, with special
support for theological needs such as scripture references and
Strongs numberings. When books have been prepared in ThML, many new
features will become possible in the CCEL: subject and
scripture reference indexes for books and for the whole library,
intelligent searching, automatic conversion to other formats, "lining
up" documents in various ways such as parallel columns, and more.
Most of the work of preparing electronic texts for conversion to ThML
can be done in a word processor. These simple
guidelines are a good starting point. ThML documents can also be
prepared with an XML editor or text editor. The tools used with ThML
documents run under Unix or Windows. Tool currently exist for
converting from Word/RTF to ThML and from ThML to HTML webs.
The following information is available on ThML and related topics:
Resources.
- A perl program -- thm2htm -- which will
convert a ThML file to an HTML web. It builds a table of contents
and indexes, handles notes appropriately, links scripture references
to the Bible Gateway, etc.
- Tools for
conversion of Word 2000 documents to ThML and HTML webs. These are
perl scripts configured for unix, though they would work under windows
if the control script h2h were converted to h2h.bat as needed. Still
no doubt buggy, and best used by someone who knows perl, but they
make pretty nice HTML editions -- see, for example,
NPNF1-01.
Also, some documentation on their use is
available.
Sample ThML documents. Several documents are available in
ThML -- these have an xml extension. They have been converted to
HTML webs, and in many cases an RTF source version is available as
well. If so, the ThML version is derived from the RTF version by
programs listed below. The HTML version is linked below; other
versions are accessible from the title page.
You should download the xml files to your disk and view them
with a text editor -- some browsers have trouble loading XML.
Note also that ThML which is automatically generated from an RTF
document is a bit grungy; clean, elegant ThML can only be created by
hand editing. See for example Watts' Psalms and Hymns, below.
Note: Only the starred (*) documents have been converted with
the latest version of thm2htm at this time.
If you are interested in discussing markup for theological texts
and scripture -- the information that is needed for theological study or
for your application -- or ThML in particular, you can join the ThML
mailing list. To join, send a message to
[email protected].
The body of the message should contain
the line "subscribe thml-list" without the quotes. To unsubscribe,
do the same with a message containing "unsubscribe thml-list".
The list is
archived
starting 9/14/99.
Other Projects using ThML
For you SGML/XML types:
There is an XML DTD for ThML. The current version of the DTD (1.0b4)
is available (ThML10b5.zip).
This DTD includes (is a superset of) the Voyager (XML) DTD of HTML 4.0.
Changes from the 1.0b2 DTD:
Added element to header info for series ID of which this
is a volume
Made the element able to have content, for marking what
was an index of the print edition
Added filebreak attribute to the div1..div6 elements
Changes from the 1.0b1 (and 0.993) DTD are:
Include an "artistic license" statement
Add an authorID attribute to the author element (for hymns)
Software for validating ThML documents, converting
ThML to HTML, etc. is available for DOS (thmlx.zip) or unix (thmlx.tgz). This software has remaining bugs,
but it works reasonably well.
In the unix case, you will need to install the SP package -- see How to get SP.
You will also need to install rtf2xml if you are starting
from Word files.
Help Wanted
- Try your hand at editing a ThML document
- Write scripts to convert content to ThML. For example, write a
script to convert the Online Bible text files to ThML.
(Check with me first about copyright, etc.)
- Prepare font mapping files to work with Skip Gaeda's program that
maps Greek and Hebrew fonts into Unicode. Or work on a program that
goes the other way: Unicode to particular Greek/Hebrew fonts.
- Write a Microsoft Word/Visual Basic for Applications program to
convert older CCEL word documents to the stylesheet used for ThML
- Write Word macros to help format documents in word for ThML
