PBB: Has anyone gotten links to work?

It works partly for me Rosie.

Here are your examples just copied to the docx file and compiled:

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/254705#Comment_254705

It works partly for me Rosie.

Here are your examples just copied to the docx file and compiled:

Weird. I wonder why it doesn't work for me. We're both running the same version of the beta, both on Windows.

Yes, after reading the wiki page, I would have expected only the last of my trial Preface links to be the one that worked. But I'm puzzled why it doesn't work (nor the Bible link) for me.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/254709#Comment_254709

Weird. I wonder why it doesn't work for me

There's probably some tiny difference in spacing or capitalisation. The compiler is currently enormously sensitive to this. If there's a syntax it struggles with for some reason, it can affect subsequent tags and stop them working, too.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/254715#Comment_254715

Weird. I wonder why it doesn't work for me

There's probably some tiny difference in spacing or capitalisation. The compiler is currently enormously sensitive to this. If there's a syntax it struggles with for some reason, it can affect subsequent tags and stop them working, too.

I copied/pasted the Bible link right out of the wiki page. Tried stripping the document down so that that's all that was in it. Still didn't work.

Tim Hensler

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/254724#Comment_254724

I've had intermittent problems with copied tags. I found that if I past it as plain text (by washing it through Notepad or using PureText - http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/) the success rate increases.

Occasionally, when I edit a tag, it doesn't work and even looks different in the output, like I typed something wrong, but when I look at the source DOCX file it's OK. I wonder if the compiler is picking up some lower layer data MS Word might use to perform an undo or other magical MS function.

Sometimes they seem to work better with a space after the colon between the data type and data value. For instance, [[bible: jn 3:16]] works better with the space between the colon and the 'j" than [[bible:jn 3:16]] does without the space.

These little tricks don't fix the problems every time, but they do seem to improve my odds. Hope they help you and others, and Logos with their work on this.

Lynden O. Williams

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/254724#Comment_254724

Rosie I used an old sermon, deactivated smart tags, compiled it and it opens to my preferred Bible. Is this what you're refering to?

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/254775#Comment_254775

Rosie I used an old sermon, deactivated smart tags, compiled it and it opens to my preferred Bible. Is this what you're refering to?

I don't have smart tags enabled. I just typed in the reference into an empty document as the syntax was given by Mark on the wiki page (which is based on the PBB tutorial). For example, I tried this:

This is a test of [[Bible: jn 3:16]].

I tried it both with and without the space after the colon, with and without the space after jn. Recompiled it each time I made a change, and each time it did not turn that tag into a link. It still looks exactly like [[Bible: jn 3:16]] (or whatever variant with/without spaces I tried) in the compiled resource. I would expect it to look like John 3:16 and be clickable. It's not.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/254784#Comment_254784

There is an issue with the Bible milestones. As I did a couple of Bibles with the v3 milestones, it works but from time to time you see a milestone not processed. And next time you do the compilation, you get different results. So it is up to developers to do something about it, I suppose.

EDITED: And I do not use space between the [[@bible: and the reference.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/254887#Comment_254887

OK, I figured out what was the problem, but it doesn't give me much encouragement. It appears to be caused by all the garbage that Word spews out in its XML files (.docx format is just a zipped bunch of xml files and folders). Here's an example of the kind of garbage I saw when I examined what was in the XLM of my very simple document:

No wonder the Logos PBB compiler had trouble parsing it! It was supposed to look like this:

This is a test of [[bible:jn 3:16]].

(I'd been playing around with upper/lower case b and j, and putting spaces in and removing them, which is why those bits are split up in the Word XML.) Even running it through PureText didn't work. I had to start with a Plain Text file created in Notepad, open it in Word and Save As .docx in order to get it to work, but it finally did work.

Wow! If this process is going to be so convoluted, no normal users will ever figure out how to get it to work properly. The Logos parser is going to have to get smarter about ignoring garbage XML tags. Too bad Word doesn't have some simple way to clean up the XML to its purest minimal form. Here's what it looks like after I created the proper syntax (which turns out to be a capital B but lowercase j) in a .txt file in Notepad and then read it into Word and saved as .docx:

There. Much cleaner, though still some unnecessary redundancy.

NB.Mick

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/254892#Comment_254892

Here's an example of the kind of garbage I saw when I examined what was in the XLM of my very simple document:

[:O]

Todd Phillips

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/254892#Comment_254892

The Logos parser is going to have to get smarter about ignoring garbage XML tags.

I'm betting Logos can do it. It seems that if they just preprocessed the XML to remove all XML tags between sets of double square brackets ("[[" & "]]"), then it shouldn't cause any problems and would then parse correctly.

That is some ugly XML though. Word's HTML output is ugly too.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/254908#Comment_254908

The Logos parser is going to have to get smarter about ignoring garbage XML tags.

I'm betting Logos can do it. It seems that if they just preprocessed the XML to remove all XML tags between sets of double square brackets ("[[" & "]]"), then it shouldn't cause any problems and would then parse correctly.

That is some ugly XML though. Word's HTML output is ugly too.

In the meantime, do you know of any XML cleaner-upper so that I can keep playing around with PBB in Beta 6? Is it is now, it's really time consuming for me to do any testing. Converting my Early Church Fathers TOC to a PBB which is the next project I'm working on will be prohibitively so.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/254915#Comment_254915

In the meantime, do you know of any XML cleaner-upper so that I can keep playing around with PBB in Beta 6? Is it is now, it's really time consuming for me to do any testing. Converting my Early Church Fathers TOC to a PBB which is the next project I'm working on will be prohibitively so.

Here's what I do for stripping Word tags:

Save the Document as RTF.
Open it in WordPad, and save it again as an RTF.
Re-open it in Word and save as a docx

I'm not sure how well that works on Windows 7, as WordPad is more complex now. But if you have Windows 7, you can also try opening docx files in WordPad and experimenting there.

Todd Phillips

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/254915#Comment_254915

In the meantime, do you know of any XML cleaner-upper so that I can keep playing around with PBB in Beta 6? Is it is now, it's really time consuming for me to do any testing. Converting my Early Church Fathers TOC to a PBB which is the next project I'm working on will be prohibitively so.

No I don't. I'd probably write a Perl script to clean it up if I wanted to really work with it more extensively, but I'm gonna wait for Logos to do it.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/254926#Comment_254926

That is exactly what I was afraid of. In the old v3 days I worked in PSPad to get very clean simple HTML. If you opened that in Word and saved, you got all kind of garbage. It slowed down old pbbs very much. We have to find a way how to clean up docx files before we compile them. John Comb's Builder Builder had that function also. We need something like that for the new PBBs. Rosie, you found it first... and you worked for Microsoft... [;)]

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/254919#Comment_254919

In the meantime, do you know of any XML cleaner-upper so that I can keep playing around with PBB in Beta 6? Is it is now, it's really time consuming for me to do any testing. Converting my Early Church Fathers TOC to a PBB which is the next project I'm working on will be prohibitively so.

Here's what I do for stripping Word tags:

Save the Document as RTF.

Open it in WordPad, and save it again as an RTF.

Re-open it in Word and save as a docx

I'm not sure how well that works on Windows 7, as WordPad is more complex now. But if you have Windows 7, you can also try opening docx files in WordPad and experimenting there.

I tried that method with the Bible text that gave me a lot of unprocessed Bible milestones. I saved it in RTF, opened in WordPad, saved as docx (in the WordPad) and compiled. And... great! Bible milestones are correct. All of them. Good job Mark. [Y]

EDITED: I did a second Bible (now in Polish language) and it works perfect as far as the Bible milestones are concerned.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/255052#Comment_255052

I did a second Bible (now in Polish language) and it works perfect as far as the Bible milestones are concerned.

Here's the Gdanska Bible in PBB format, in case you don't already have it. The Bible book names are in English, sorry, but I'm sure you can edit them easily enough: 4380.Polska Biblia Gdańska.docx

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/255059#Comment_255059

Here's the Gdanska Bible in PBB format,

Thank you Mark. I have a text, but I do not have it tagged yet. I did another Polish translation (The Millenium Bible). I am going to try your file. Thank you again. [Y]

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/255052#Comment_255052

I tried that method with the Bible text that gave me a lot of unprocessed Bible milestones. I saved it in RTF, opened in WordPad, saved as docx (in the WordPad) and compiled. And... great! Bible milestones are correct.

Whilst the WordPad method strips out unwanted XML, it also strips out headings! I've now settled on a new method, which seems to work very well.

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/255029#Comment_255029

Rosie, you found it first... and you worked for Microsoft...

Yeah, and I worked as a developer on Word back in the good old days when we had a proprietary binary file format. I was one of the ones opposed to switching to a structured markup language type of file format, which was being considered years before it ever happened. So I can't be blamed for the yucky HTML/XML that the current incarnations of Word generate.