Incorrect poetry tags in 1 Chronicles

[DavidHaslam]

Poetry tags are wrong. There's no marker called \qt1.

Poetry tags are like paragraph tags. No end tag is needed.

Please read the USFM User Reference and use the proper poetry markers.

• Always remember the correct syntax for USFM tags.
• The underscore in the documentation signifies a required space.

Thus, using level 1 poetry tags, you should have:

\v 18 Amasa, who was commander-in-chief, was inspired to reply,
\q1 We are your men, David,
\q1 on your side, O son of Jesse!
\q1 Peace, peace to you,
\q1 and to your helpers peace--
\q1 for your God helps you!
\p Then David admitted them and made them captains of his band.

The paragraph tag ends the poetry lines.

[ThomHehl]

Oh, dear, @DavidHaslam, I was combining the quoted text and the poetry tags.

So it looks like the quotes don't have a level. How do I handle a quote in a quote? The example uses a single quote inline.

Thanks so much for your help!

[DavidHaslam]

It's not a case of quote within a quote. Rather it's a quotation that is also poetry (of sorts). Try this as an improvement.

\p \v 18 Amasa, who was commander-in-chief, was inspired to reply,
\q1 \qt We are your men, David,\qt*
\q2 \qt on your side, O son of Jesse!\qt*
\q1 \qt Peace, peace to you,\qt*
\q2 \qt and to your helpers peace―\qt*
\q2 \qt for your God helps you!\qt*
\p Then David admitted them and made them captains of his band.

Note that I also made 3 lines as level 2 poetry using \q2 in place of \q1.

btw. I also replaced the -- by a horizontal bar, U+2015. It's displayed length will be font-dependent.

I assumed that v18 is the start of a new paragraph, without checking back.

[DavidHaslam]

Quoted text is a special character style, so it has a start and end tag.

Poetry tags are classed with paragraph tags. They don't have an end tag.

[DavidHaslam]

If you need to make use of non-ANSI characters, suggest download and install the excellent Unicode text editor called BabelPad.

[ThomHehl]

@DavidHaslam Wow! Thanks again for the save.

Since there are no quotations in the original text and only one level of indent, and no paragraphs anywhere around verse 18, I used this:

\v 18 Amasa, who was commander-in-chief, was inspired to reply, \q1 We are your men, David, \q1 on your side, O son of Jesse! \q1 Peace, peace to you, \q1 and to your helpers peace-- \q1 for your God helps you! Then David admitted them and made them captains of his band.

[ThomHehl]

@DavidHaslam the quotations I was discussing are from 11:1-2:

\c 11 \p \v 1 Then all Israel gathered round David at Hebron, saying, \qt Here we are, your own bone and flesh! \v 2 In bygone days, even when Saul was our king, it was you who led Israel out and in; the Eternal your God said to you, \qt You shall shepherd my people Israel, you shall be prince over my people Israel!\qt\qt

[DavidHaslam]

You need a paragraph tag before Then David ...

Otherwise it's counted as part of the last poetry line.

[ThomHehl]

Like this: \v 18 Amasa, who was commander-in-chief, was inspired to reply, \q1 We are your men, David, \q1 on your side, O son of Jesse! \q1 Peace, peace to you, \q1 and to your helpers peace-- \q1 for your God helps you! \p Then David admitted them and made them captains of his band.

[DavidHaslam]

Yes.

I've not looked at this passage in the printed edition, so I've not checked to see of any poetry lines have a larger indent than others.

Here's an "Aha!" insight about USFM.

ParaTExt treats an end of line more or less like a space. The EOLs are not really that significant.

It expects certain tags to be at the start of a line, but that's more an internal requirement.

Not sure how Bibledit fares in this respect.

In adyeths/u2o.py script, the first thing he does is to linearise each input USFM file.

[DavidHaslam]

If Moffatt has a horizontal bar rather than two hyphens, aim to match him accurately.

Using Unicode is not difficult.

[ThomHehl]

My OCR software scans the em dash inconsistently, so I decided to simply use -- to replace them. I think I agree with you, though, that I should use a proper em dash, but, when I made that decision, I knew it would be easy enough to do a search and replace later and that's probably what I'll end up doing.

Thanks again for the assist.

[DavidHaslam]

Referring to your observation about the other passage:

\c 11
\p
\v 1 Then all Israel gathered round David at Hebron, saying, \qt Here we are, your own bone and flesh!
\v 2 In bygone days, even when Saul was our king, it was you who led Israel out and in; the Eternal your God said to you, \qt You shall shepherd my people Israel, you shall be prince over my people Israel!\qt*\qt*

I don't think quoted text within quoted text like this would work.

You should use the nested syntax for character level USFM tags.

\c 11
\p
\v 1 Then all Israel gathered round David at Hebron, saying, \qt Here we are, your own bone and flesh!
\v 2 In bygone days, even when Saul was our king, it was you who led Israel out and in; the Eternal your God said to you, \+qt You shall shepherd my people Israel, you shall be prince over my people Israel!\+qt*\qt*

This is a very interesting case. Worth looking to see how u2o.py handles it.

NB. I've not previously discussed this with any of my expert ParaTExt friends, so I've just sent an email to one of them to ask his advice.

[DavidHaslam]

Upon further thought, I think there's some confusion here.

This passage in chapter 11 is not an example of quoted text within quoted text. It is merely an example of a speech that includes some quoted text.

I expect this analysis will be confirmed when my friend replies.

The outer tags are therefore not required. The inner tags need not use nested syntax.

Unless, of course, a different pair of tags is used to wrap the speech. Modern translations simply use quotation marks for that purpose. There's no special tags for speech per se, apart from the \wj_...\wj* markers used for the Words of Jesus (which facilitates red letter editions).

[ThomHehl]

Would you be so kind as to mention that to them, @DavidHaslam. I will let you know how it turns out from u20.py.

[DavidHaslam]

I will await his reply.

[DavidHaslam]

I've had a holding message reply, so I sent him my later analysis.

The important thing to understand is that quoted text always quotes text from someone or something else.

Most speech is not quoted text.

The confusion arises because we often call speech marks quotation marks.

In fact, the name of each of Unicode characters is ...... QUOTATION MARK.

[DavidHaslam]

My friend replied as follows:

The label \qt is used for quoting a section or verse of Scripture from elsewhere. Usually in the stylesheet it will be marked to be italicised. It is closed with a \qt*
It has be closed and re-opened at each new verse marker e.g. \qt …. \qt* \v 1 \qt ……. \qt*

At the end of a \qt I would usually expect a `\x …. \xcross-reference note telling me where it is quoted from. I cannot think of a case in the Bible where we need to do **nested**\qti.e.\qt …. +qt ….+qt… \qt` and I do not think this is one of those cases. Just quoting someone’s speech is not the same as a quotation from elsewhere.

So if you are digitising an old text that did not use “….” then I would not expect you to need to use \qt … \qt* where today you would put “…”.

So in the King James for 2 Samuel 5:1-2 we have simply:

\v 1 Then came all the tribes of Israel to David unto Hebron, and spake, saying, Behold, we \add are\add* thy bone and thy flesh. \v 2 Also in time past, when Saul was king over us, thou wast he that leddest out and broughtest in Israel: and the \nd LORD\nd* said to thee, Thou shalt feed my people Israel, and thou shalt be a captain over Israel.

and in the parallel verse in 1 Chronicles 11:1-2

\p \v 1 Then all Israel gathered themselves to David unto Hebron, saying, Behold, we \add are\add* thy bone and thy flesh. \v 2 And moreover in time past, even when Saul was king, thou \add wast\add* he that leddest out and broughtest in Israel: and the \nd LORD\nd* thy God said unto thee, Thou shalt feed my people Israel, and thou shalt be ruler over my people Israel.

Without seeing what you are digitising it is hard to know what you want to do. Is part of this verse indented or italicised in the original which you need to mark up? If there is nothing which needs to be marked up then it looks to me like you do not need to use \qt at all in these lines.