Import PBB's into L4

Hi Robert, compiled L3 PBB's cannot be directly imported into L4. If you have (or have access to) the source documents that the PBB's were built from (Word documents), those can be recompiled in L4.

Rosie had her autoposter (that's why she has so many posts[;)]) turned on and it responded at the same time I was.

In Libronix the ability to read PBBs was a separate purchase or bundled with base packages. Authoring required a subscription (if I remember a yearly fee to author books)

In L4 it is completely free. Someone reported during testing that they created a new Logos account with no purchases and they could create PBs with it.

To clarify even further, the new L4 PBB is a completely new thing, and they decided to make it free. The Lic you purchased before was for Libronix's PBB feature which doesn't work anymore. Well, it still works in Libronix if you still have it. But it's not like you paid for something which now people are getting for free. Well, it kind of is. But that's the direction the whole world has been moving anyway. Used to be you'd have to pay for recorded courses from the top universities in America (if they were even available). Now you can listen to a lot of them for free on iTunes U. And so on...

Robert Booth said:

Thanks, but my my that sounds as bad as the first apparent contradiction, it doesn't work but it still does; the second is worse.....I understand but really I do not. I think I do but then again I got lost in the jumble.....It either does or does not; it either is or is not.  Remember yea is yea and your nay is nay......

Ha ha, you sure made me look foolish! I guess I didn't clarify anything. Sorry for the muddle.

Well, since we're talking about PBB in Libronix: Would it be possible to get a refund on that.  I only used it once and even purchased the training CDs but Logos 4 came along a couple of months right after I bought it that I never had the chance to go and build books.  So in essense I never really used my unlimited license.  It'd be nice to get Logos credit, I don't want the cash just other books...[;)]

DAL

Ps. It's a joke...lol...with Logos being so gracious enough to give us the ability to build better books with the better and improved PB tool who cares if I paid and didn't use the old one, I have access to the better new one for FREE.  This brings me to the following statement: THANK YOU LOGOS! Free PB tool is SO GREAT! AND FREE! [:D]

NewbieMick said:

I tend to concur with KS4J that making a L4-PB can be a thing of very short time - if you download one of the books from the Files subforum or any other source that gives you word files intended for the PB compiler, all you have to do is filing in some minimal info and build it (I wasn't around in L3 times, but those that were tell of massive effort).

I agree too. Any Word .docx file will build just fine into a Logos book without you having to do any work on it first. Bible references get tagged automatically by the compiler. You don't need to do anything to the document, although most people like to do the bare minimum of formatting the headings as Heading styles, so that they appear in the Table of Contents. But even that you can do without.

So to create a minimal new L4 PB from scratch, assuming you have access to the text somewhere (e.g., on a website), just copy/paste the text into Word, save as .docx, go into Logos and select Tools > Personal Books, Add book, type in the title and the author, click "Add file...", select the .docx file from your hard disk, then click Build Book. Seriously takes all of a couple of minutes. If it's a longer book spread over multiple web pages, it would take somewhat longer to copy/paste all the text into your Word document. But still, it's relatively mechanical work and doesn't take all that long.

What takes the longest is if you've got a badly OCR'ed text as your source, and you want to go through and edit it all and clean up all the typos and format it nicely. Or if you want to create a Bible or Calendar Devotional other special type of Logos book that requires manual tagging.

Robert Booth said:

 

Yes tis true, I, unfortunately as with many, still have L3 loaded, I would like to see the day when I only have one version of the software present, but the issue of the PBB's is still there and until they come up with some sort of ability to bring them over - well it is still there.

Give us a list of the PBBs you have in L3 that you'd like to see in L4 and maybe there are already some folks keen to get working on converting them, that is, any that are in the public domain. I might even do one or two of them for you if you ask nicely... [;)]

Robert Booth said:

 

My original understanding of the PBB was just that, a 'Personal Book Builder'[some of us ole' guys get this] - you made your own. Just to copy text from oh let’s say esword and convert it to a docx then insert it into the pb

Your original understanding is correct. I don't see any contradiction with what I've been describing.

Robert Booth said:

If you still have the L3 and still read some of those PBB’s you acquired for free– I think my point has been proven……somebody went through a lot of work for your leisure………….

Yes, I agree with you 100%! It's wonderful work people have done. And people are continuing to do that for L4. For example, I'm at work on Martyrs Mirror right now, which is over 1000 pages! (Nobody had ever done it before for L3.) And I'm doing the real work. Laboriously going through page by page and proofreading it and correcting the typos that were there from the person who had laboriously converted it to HTML before (I kind of feel like the monks who were copyists who preserved the text of many books through the centuries), and formatting it for best viewing in Logos. But I didn't type the text in myself; I got it from the Internet, as it's a public domain work. It was originally scanned and OCR'ed by someone else. See all the other user contributed Personal Books here. There's a growing list, and people are gradually chipping away at some that were previously available in L3 and hadn't been converted yet.

Thomas Black is still hoping that all the people who went to all that work to make those PBB's that he hosts on StillTruth.com still have their original Word documents that they created them from. Then it would be a piece of cake to move them over to L4. Logos has not made any indications that they have any plans to convert the compiled L3 PBs directly into compiled L4 books.

Robert Booth said:

 

Copy/paste from the internet can lead to copyright infringements...

Yes, of course. I was merely using that as an example. There are all kinds of sources of text for PBs. One is typing it in manually from a paper book you own. I think that's probably fewer than 1% of where these books came from. Tens of thousands of public domain books are available somewhere online already, and we have the freedom to convert them into any digital format we want. People do have their own books they've written, of course, and some have published these as PB's but not many of the ones people have been sharing around for L3 were original authors' works. Most of them were public domain stuff.

Robert Booth said:

 

...also when they take the page down or change it, I am not to eager, or willing, to go that route...

Most of the public domain works that are on the Internet already are there to stay and aren't going to change. Anyway, once someone has copied it to a Word document and done whatever tagging they want to do for Logos, it doesn't matter if the original website is taken down or changes. That .docx file can be shared with other Logos users through the Files forum, or StillTruth.com, or the forthcoming Logos PB store. There are a few "oldies" like me and even some "newbies" who are making these things and learning how it works and learning that it's not that hard, though it can sometimes be time consuming. But it's a labor of love.

Robert, according to this page on StillTruth.com, that one was originally created by John McComb. But I've just downloaded it and opened it in L3 to take a look. Doesn't look like it would take me too long to convert it to a Word document, and since it's public domain, I can do that.

In fact, it took me just 10 minutes to copy/paste it all into a Word document, book by book. It'll take me another 10 minutes to do all the heading formatting, which I'll do later as I'm kind of busy right now, but I'll post it for you when it's done.

But I don't know Greek, so I can't do any proofing or fixing of the text; can just take it exactly as is. In particular, I noticed some things that look like that can't possibly be correct Greek, namely the slash character in various places, e.g. at the end of Chapter 7 of Hermas Similitude 5:

If you could tell me what that character is supposed to be, I can do a global replace, but it really probably should be looked over (each instance) by someone who knows Greek to prevent making a mess of the whole thing which a global replace can do.

EDIT: OK, the headings only took me 5 minutes, since I was able to use a macro to do most of them. And another 10 minutes to hook up the table of contents at the beginning to bookmarks at the beginning of each book. So it's done. I did find a crashing bug in Logos in the process, though. Don't try right clicking on anything in this book! Logos doesn't like that. (I hadn't tried any PB's with Greek text in them before.) I will report it in another thread as a bug for them to look into.

8512.Early Church Fathers in Greek.docx

EDIT2:

Robert Booth said:

edit 2: WOW!! I just did a copy of the whole for that and then pasted/made a docx[after checking the format and such] then did the 'add book' - well bust my buffers. it did the chapters and everything i did not need to change a thing.....hhmmm that was interesting.....even searchable..

Bummer! I should have waited to see if you would do this yourself before spending any time on it. But oh well, I realized I did more work than I needed to. It picks up the heading formatting by itself. But I did find a bug in the process. Does L4 crash for you like it does for me when you right click on any word in the book?

I have MS Office 2007 as well.

Here's my process:

1. Create a new blank Word document  [EDIT: my default font is Times New Roman 10 pt]

2. Open the book in Libronix

3. Toggle the Contents pane on

4. For each book in the contents pane: click on its title, select all the text (quickest way: click at the top of the book, then scroll with the scroll bar down to the end and Shift+click at the end of the book), copy (Ctrl+C), Alt+Tab to Word, page (Ctrl+V), delete the automatically inserted footnote (Shift+LeftArrow twice to select it, then Backspace), then hit Enter to add a blank line.

5. Save the document as .docx

This is probably where I could have stopped since you noticed that Logos picked up the heading formatting automatically.

6. After that I went and formatted all the Book names as Heading 1 (I first redefined Heading 1 to be the existing formatting of those paragraphs by right-clicking it on the ribbon and selecting Update Heading 1 to Match Selection) and all the Chapter headings as Heading 2 (ditto about redefining Heading 2 first). I did the Heading 1 styles manually, but I recorded a simple macro to change the formatting of the current paragraph to Heading 2 and then find the next occurrence of "Chapter" and assigned it to a key combination and kept hitting that key combination (actually just held it down) all the way through the whole document, so it went pretty quickly.

[EDIT: 6a - then I realized that some of the text was blue and I didn't want that in the final document, so I selected the whole thing and formatted it as Automatic font color (i.e., black)]

7. Then I created bookmarks at the beginning of each book (Insert Bookmark), calling them clement1, clement2, etc.

8. Then I inserted hyperlinks on all the book names in the table at the beginning of the document (select the text and press Ctrl+K) and had them point to the corresponding bookmarks (select Place in this Document on the left side of the dialog, and choose the appropriate bookmark on the right side).

9. Save again.

That's it!

Robert Booth said:

 Rosie,

I appreciate everything. But, when we do this we lose the search capability of the Gk word. If you open this in L3, click the Gk word and do the Execute Keylink(should you have wordstudy set) it works, when we change the formatting we loose this capability, I was trying to keeps this....But I do appreciate you working on this.

Which takes us back to my original posting, Hopefully it will happen.....

Robert

It should work in fine in L4.5a Beta 4. They've just fixed the crashing bug I reported, and it's now working for me. Make sure when you created the PB in the Personal Books tool you set the language to Greek, not the default English, and rebuild the book if you need to change that setting. Then if you right-click on a word and choose Lookup or Bible Word Study (if it's a word that also appears in the Bible) from the left side of the menu, you should get everything you're used to from L3's keylink. Let me know if I'm missing something.

Oh, I just realized that the Perseus Web Lookup command is not available on the right-click menu in this book for me in L4, whereas it was available in L3. But don't despair. We'll get to the bottom of this. It's probably something wrong in the Logos engine, or maybe something I wasn't aware of that I have to do in the .docx file to get this to work. I'll report another bug. They're really responsive to these bug reports, so I should get an answer soon. If it's a mea culpa, I'll be able to fix it right away. If it's a Logos problem, we might need to wait until the next major release if it's low priority for them. But the intent is and always has been to have full functionality that PBB's had in L3 replicated in the new L4 model. It might still be a work in progress though... I appreciate your hanging in there!

OK, I think I see what's going on. There's no Lemma tab on the right-click menu in this PB, whereas there is for Logos edition Greek texts. If there were a Lemma tab, you'd select Lemma, then Bible Word Study, and it would go directly to the BWS. I see no reason why a PB should behave any differently from a Logos native book. They are supposed to be identical, so there's some internal problem, or else I haven't tagged the .docx properly. I'm thinking that the missing Lemma tab might very well mean I have to do some more tagging. We'll see.

I think the bug report I just submitted should address this. I'm awaiting a response from Logos. They gave pretty quick turnaround to the previous bug report, so I'm pretty sure this will get sorted out quickly as well, whether it's me who has to do some more work or Logos.

This is a relatively new feature still, and as yet not very well tested. I'm a beta tester, so I'm willing to encounter some of these problems along the way and help them get everything working as it was intended to.

In the end, L4 should give you all the functionality you had grown to expect in L3, and it should be as efficient, though it might looks slightly different how you get there.

EDIT: I just noticed on the wiki page about Personal Books that "The ‘Lemma’ tab in the (right-click) context menu is not currently supported." That implies to me that it will be supported at some point, that it's in the plans. I hope it will be coming along soon. I'll edit my bug report to ask about this.