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crosswire / xiphos

Xiphos is a Bible study tool written for Linux, UNIX, and Windows using GTK, offering a rich and featureful environment for reading, study, and research using modules from The SWORD Project and elsewhere.
http://xiphos.org
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Bible showing weird characters (probably font/encoding issue) #872

Closed vonpupp closed 6 years ago

vonpupp commented 6 years ago

Hello,

I am trying to use the TS2009 on Xiphos. Unfortunately I had to convert it from a mysword .bbl.mybible module. To do so I used two programs on a very old Windows XP VM that I still have. The first tool used to convert it is called Bible converter, which produced this zip file that should work directly on Xiphos. The second tool used is Simple Bible reader, which produced this other zip file. The first program seems to be part of the second, I guess this is why both zip files are exactly equals in bytes size.

When I install TS2009 on mysword it is recommended to also install the TS2009 fonts for accented Greek. There is a list with 9 fonts but I guess the important one is Junicode. I installed this font on Arch Linux using pacman however Xiphos doesn't seem to render the text properly.

I am not sure where the problem is, if it is either on the conversion, a font issue or Xiphos itself. Any idea?

Thank you very much.

karlkleinpaste commented 6 years ago

The 2 zip files have identical content. No idea what this conversion process did, or how it's supposed to work. It's not a font issue; the content is screwed. At a guess, you've got compressed text instead of the real original, and no way for us to recover the original. Not a Xiphos or Sword problem.

vonpupp commented 6 years ago

Thanks for your answer @karlkleinpaste.

Do you know how to convert a mysword .bbl.mybible module to a SWORD module? Are there any tools part of the Xiphos/SWORD project? Preferably that runs on Linux and are open source?

Apparently any .bbl.mybible file is a sqlite database, which I am able to browse with sqlitebrowser. The TS2009.bbl.mybible seems to have these weird "unicode" characters from the original source on sqlitebrowser also. Both the shown on Xiphos and the content on sqlitebrowser seems to be "similar", this is why I thought it could have been a font/encoding issue.

I used that same tool in the past to convert other bbl modules without problems. I had to uncheck an option for it to complete the process otherwise it will crash. I suspect it is related to the encoding but since the tool is for Windows and no code is available, I cannot do anything.