links to references in St. Thomas Aquinas's commentary on the Gospel of St. John
I am making a personal book and am trying to include references in St. Thomas's commentary on St. John's gospel, which is available on Verbum. The problem I have is that there does not seem to be any way of linking to specific parts of the book using the paragraph numbers that are included, this despite the fact that the book is indexed by paragraph number in its topical index.
Does anyone know how I can make links to specific paragraphs in my personal book besides copying and pasting the link of each of the more than two thousand locations?
Best,
James M. Smith
Comments
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Unfortunately, with the current tagging, no.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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James Smith said:
I am making a personal book and am trying to include references in St. Thomas's commentary on St. John's gospel (...) Does anyone know how I can make links to specific paragraphs in my personal book besides copying and pasting the link of each of the more than two thousand locations?
As MJ explained, there is a lack of 'tagging' in such resources that would allow precised linking to a paragraph. 'Tagging' is used in several senses on this forum, here it means that it would require a datatype index for Aquinas - something that exists for several ECF, for example - and this datatype being present in your commentary - which unfortunately is not always the case even for ECF works. Building a datatype and applying it to books is normally done only when there are several editions of a text in various books - and even then not for all books. Production cost etc. If there's only one book that has a text, you most often are stuck with the page index. You are lucky in that respect if the book is a type:commentary, so you'll have a bible index on top. But we are stuck with what is called Resource Links (i.e. they go to a specific book instead of to a datatype reference).
What you can do instead of copy & pasting the actual link is to guess it.
First, find out how the link generally looks like.
I don't own the Commentary on John, but the one on Matthew, indexed by page and bible (Vulgate, yes! Someone at least thought about that). Make sure you are currently using the bible index:
copy the link as url ....
....and paste it into your PB source document. It will look like this:
logosres:kimballcom61mt;ref=BibleVUL.Mt6.1-4
(if you had text selected, it may look like this
logosres:kimballcom61mt;ref=BibleVUL.Mt6.1-4;off=64;ctx=_before_men._Above,_~the_Lord_fulfilled_t
just cut out the stuff after the Mt6.1-4 part)
you may know that in a PB you can now reference the location Matthew 6, Verses 1-4 with
[[Any text you like >> logosres:kimballcom61mt;ref=BibleVUL.Mt6.1-4 ]]
Second, use this as a template for the links you want to create
You know they'll start with logosres:kimballcom61mt;ref=BibleVUL. and then a reference to a bible text in Matthew, written as MtX.Y
with X the chapter and Y the verse or verse range. What we have is a template.
- You can thus cite the commentary on any verse that is treated in the text (presumably all that are in Matthew) by pasting in the template and adding/adjusting the chapter and verse number
Logos is automatically finding the verse within the ranges the commentary uses, so simply guessing the index to any verse will work.
I thus put a link to Matthew 6:8 into my PB: [[Test >> logosres:kimballcom61mt;ref=BibleVUL.Mt6.8]] and it works
You see from the mouse-over that Logos will not only find it in the range treated in the commentary (Mt 6:5-8), but Logos will even display the bibelverse in my currently highest prioritized bible.
The only remaining difficulty is the precision: when the comment on a verse or range spans many paragraphs and you wanted to link to a specific one: with the current tagging, no joy.
Of course, when you have pages over pages on one verse, you can at least create links to pages from the book by this same method which may be a tad more efficient than switching between the books and copy-pasting all the time.
Hope this helps a bit
Mick
Have joy in the Lord!
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Dear MJ, thanks for your quick reply.
Dear Mick, thank you for your reply, and for your generous and extensive instructions. It is very helpful. I finally decided to try to build my own dataset of the locations of all 2,660 paragraphs of St. Thomas's commentary, this way I can link directly to exactly the paragraph I want--or so I had hoped.
I started out to build the dataset by searching for each paragraph number by putting the following examples into the search box: "1. "..."12. "..."56. " etc. Including the period and the space has guaranteed that 99 percent of the time I get the right paragraph number, especially when I go in sequence.
There seems to be an anomaly that the links to the paragraphs in the prologue of the commentary have a different format, but the rest all seem to be according to scripture passage system you mention. I decided to keep the offset data in order to get precisely to the beginning of the paragraph. Regardless, here are some sample links:
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=VolumePage.V_1,_p_8;off=50
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=VolumePage.V_1,_p_8;off=855
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=VolumePage.V_1,_p_8;off=1725
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=VolumePage.V_1,_p_9;off=3
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=VolumePage.V_1,_p_9;off=994
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=VolumePage.V_1,_p_9;off=1594
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=VolumePage.V_1,_p_10;off=117
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=VolumePage.V_1,_p_10;off=1179
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=VolumePage.V_1,_p_10;off=2095
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=VolumePage.V_1,_p_10;off=2351
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=VolumePage.V_1,_p_11;off=106
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=Bible.Jn1;off=139
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=Bible.Jn1;off=1348
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=Bible.Jn1;off=1720
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=Bible.Jn1;off=6510
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=Bible.Jn1;off=7877
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=Bible.Jn1;off=8643
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=Bible.Jn1;off=9510
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=Bible.Jn1;off=10497
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=Bible.Jn1;off=11351
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=Bible.Jn1;off=12274
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=Bible.Jn1;off=13233
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=Bible.Jn1;off=14924
logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=Bible.Jn1;off=16619
It is very tedious collecting all of these locations manually, but it should be quite useful once I've got it completed. However, I'm running into a problem. When pasted into a hyperlink in MS Word, the links all work perfectly (EDIT: I think I spoke too soon about that; it seems they don't all work perfectly, and I'm trying to sort that out now), invoking Verbum and opening the commentary to exactly the required location.
However, when I compile the word document in Verbum, making it into a personal book, the links no longer work, and have a certain erratic behavior (which I could describe in more detail if needed), but essentially the links that do not refer to the prologue of the commentary only go to the beginning of the chapter to which they refer, essentially ignoring the offset information. I'm wondering why the links would work from within Word, utilizing the offset data, while they stop working once brought into Word as PB.
Thank you in advance for any information anyone might have.
MJ, I noticed that you had posted about a situation that seemed to have similarities to mine, but I didn't see if your problems were resolved: https://community.logos.com/forums/t/35714.aspx
Best,
James
EDIT: fix some formatting
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Further, I just check my log file related to the compiling of the PB, and I saw a bunch of error messages that may or may not be related to the problem mentioned above:
[...]
[Warning] Unknown class name 'D1_apple-converted-space'
[Warning] Unknown class name 'D1_apple-converted-space'
[Warning] Unknown class name 'D1_apple-converted-space'
[Warning] Unknown class name 'D1_apple-converted-space'
[Warning] Unknown class name 'D1_apple-converted-space'
[Warning] Unknown class name 'D1_apple-converted-space'
[Warning] Unknown class name 'D1_apple-converted-space'
[Warning] Failed to interpret width value: 0pt
[Warning] Failed to interpret width value: 0pt
[Warning] Failed to interpret width value: 0pt
[Warning] Failed to interpret width value: 0pt
[Warning] Failed to interpret width value: 0pt
[Warning] Failed to interpret width value: 0pt
[Warning] Failed to interpret width value: 0pt
[Warning] Failed to interpret width value: 0pt[...]
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James Smith said:
Further, I just check my log file related to the compiling of the PB, and I saw a bunch of error messages that may or may not be related to the problem mentioned above:
I don't think so. It's warnings, not errors and they don't seem to belong to non-detection of links. Well, I can't say much more regarding the apple-converted-space (never seen that, I'm a PC), but the other one is typical when using tables in a PB, but doesn't impact the converted books.
What about leaving aside the Word links and simply using the official PB syntax I showed above, i.e. two opening square brackets [[ then the text you want to assign the hyperlink to - the same that's in your PB which you would have it assigned to in Word as well - then two greater-than signs >> , then the logosres-link you identified and would have put into the box of Word, just pasted into the text file, and then two closing sqare brackets ]] ?
Have joy in the Lord!
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I tried the PB syntax, and no difference that I can detect. I can however, and I assume this is with Word links as well, specify the page number, and that does work. The problem is the "off=" doesn't make any difference. I copied and pasted the same link several times, modifying only the "off=" parameter, but got not difference in results. It always opened the page at the very top of the page. Here are the links I created:
[[v. 1 p. 255, 100 >> logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=VolumePage.V_1,_p_255;off=100 ]]
[[v. 1 p. 255, 200 >> logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=VolumePage.V_1,_p_255;off=200 ]]
[[v. 1 p. 255, 500 >> logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=VolumePage.V_1,_p_255;off=500 ]]
[[v. 1 p. 255, 1,000 >> logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=VolumePage.V_1,_p_255;off=1000 ]]
[[v. 1 p. 255, 1,500 >> logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=VolumePage.V_1,_p_255;off=1500 ]]
[[v. 1 p. 255, 3,000 >> logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=VolumePage.V_1,_p_255;off=3000 ]]
[[v. 1 p. 255, 5,000 >> logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=VolumePage.V_1,_p_255;off=5000 ]]
[[v. 1 p. 255, 10,000 >> logosres:cmmgspljhnbks;ref=VolumePage.V_1,_p_255;off=10000 ]]
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So, I think we have to classify this as a bug, as the Wiki clearly says that the off= should work:
Other Resource Links
logosres:1000illsprchtch;ref=Page.p_45;off=663- logosres: – hyperlink protocol for resource
- 1000illsprchtch; – resource to be used
- ref=Page.p_45; – page to be opened
- off=663 – Offset, tells Logos how far down the page to open the resource
- If you delete the offset then Logos will open to the top of the page.
- If you delete ref=Page and everything after it then Logos will open the resource to its last used location. This can be used to create a local reading list in a note file.
https://wiki.logos.com/Hyperlinks#The_Anatomy_of_a_Link
I would be grateful for any comment from Faithlife.
Best,
James
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The offset parameter issue is a known problem. If possible, use the bible reference as it will be more accurate e.g. [[Ezekiel 12–19 >> logosres:bkc;ref=Bible.Eze12-19]]
Dave
===Windows 11 & Android 13
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Dear Dave,
Thank you for your response to this. The Bible reference option is not possible, as many commentaries will go for many pages on just one set of verses. When you say this is a known problem, does that mean that Faithlife has registered it as a bug? If so, I haven't found any recent forum items that say that, and the official Wiki says that it does work, and I've seen stated by Faithlife employees on other discussions that the off= does work. Could you please provide a citation for an acknowledgement by Faithlife on this so I can have a place to monitor for updates?
Best,
James
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James Smith said:
So, I think we have to classify this as a bug, as the Wiki clearly says that the off= should work:
...
I would be grateful for any comment from Faithlife.
The wiki is probably wrong, as on another thread I wrote (https://community.logos.com/forums/p/102217/707122.aspx#707122):
Personal Book Builder supports "high precision" links if they include both an "off" and a "ctx" parameter.
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James Smith said:
the official Wiki says that it does work
The wiki is user edited; it may contain errors or misunderstandings. Faithlife staff do not edit every wiki page for accuracy.
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Dear Bradley, and the others who have helped me on this. Noting that this resource has not been tagged, I have made database of the paragraph locations using the high precision links, including the ctx values and am attaching it here for use by others.
The attached file is in CSV format, and is very simple. Each line contains only the reference to the beginning of a single paragraph. So, the reference in the first line is a reference to the beginning of paragraph 1, etc.
If anyone notes any errors in it, I would be grateful for feed back. If anyone finds this useful, and would like the databases for St. Thomas's other scriptural commentaries (which I'm in the process of putting into personal books), please let me know, and I would be happy to share them with you.
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I'm attaching a better version of the file. In the last one, some of the lines had quotes marks.
Also, since I'm not able to post a CSV file, I've changed the file type to TXT.
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