Seeking advice from experienced Personal Book makers

Michel Pauw
Michel Pauw Member Posts: 585 ✭✭✭
edited November 2024 in English Forum

I know the basics of making a Personal Book, but I have no experience making a big one myself. 

The prospect of spending hours and hours and hours and hours at manually adding milestones etc, sounds quite daunting.

How would one go about in making a Personal Book of, for example, Matthew Henry's full commentary on the Bible (in Dutch), if you already have a formatted .docx file of the book? 

Is there any help/tutorial available teaching us how to do such a thing in maybe one hour or two? 

In other words: the question is not on how to make a PB, but how to do it quickly. 

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Comments

  • delete12066188
    delete12066188 Member Posts: 3,378 ✭✭✭

    how to do it quickly. ..buy the Commentary in Logos [;)]

    this is not a fast Thing but the fastes I know would be use my Doc and copy and paste the Fields into the Commentary. This is for Bibles for Commentary you just need [[@Bible:1 Mose 1:1]]

    seriously4784.0741.Bible.docx

  • NB.Mick
    NB.Mick MVP Posts: 16,249

    How would one go about in making a Personal Book of, for example, Matthew Henry's full commentary on the Bible (in Dutch), if you already have a formatted .docx file of the book? 

    This sounds like a great basis to start! 

    Actually, you could simply run it through the PB tool and be done. It would be a monograph, but bible verse references would be detected and it would be fully searchable in Logos. 

    In order to do more than that (i.e. make it a full-fledged commentary) you'd need to find a way to insert milestones, at least at chapter level. If the formatting allows you to single out chapter titles, e.g. by heading formatting, you could be nearly set with a simple search/replace. It might become more complex if you need to use pattern matching for that - somewhat beyond my paygrade, but I know I got it to work in the past! - but it may not be neccessary if the formatting is helpful enough (look into a current thread in the Files forum, maybe starting here: https://community.logos.com/forums/p/194782/1126193.aspx#1126193 to get ideas)  

    Have joy in the Lord! Smile

  • Kevin A
    Kevin A Member Posts: 1,060 ✭✭✭

    Any bible reference will be automatically converted.

    However there can be problems such that if it is just a partial reference, eg v5 it will automatically use the previous full reference to determine which verse to link, which is fine for most cases, however occasionally there may be a cross reference in the text which will cause problems.

    Looking at the Matthew Henry book, it seems you would have many problems, including the milestones which would need to be manually done.

  • Michel Pauw
    Michel Pauw Member Posts: 585 ✭✭✭

    Yeah, I wish there would be a macro available to do this semi-automatically. I mean, this would be a terrible job. By the time you finish you hate your book so much that you'll never use it again ;-). 

     

    Dell XPS 17 9700, W11, 32GB, 1TB SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060
    L5+L9+L10 Portfolio | Logos Max | Translator's Workplace

  • delete12066188
    delete12066188 Member Posts: 3,378 ✭✭✭

    after creating Tons of Books I still love them :-)

  • Dave Hooton
    Dave Hooton MVP Posts: 36,195

    Yeah, I wish there would be a macro available to do this semi-automatically. I mean, this would be a terrible job. By the time you finish you hate your book so much that you'll never use it again ;-). 

    Be of good cheer. If it follows the English version, the milestones have one format Verses 1-12 Verses 13-30, etc. You could have a Find/Replace based on Verses, and replacing with a shell for the milestone syntax

    Find: Verses   (case sensitive)

    Replace: [[@Bible:Jn 3:]] Verses

    i.e. change the Replace text with every Book and Chapter and fill in the actual verses. Don't do a Replace All!

    Dave
    ===

    Windows 11 & Android 13

  • delete12066188
    delete12066188 Member Posts: 3,378 ✭✭✭

    Michael dit you see my File? All you have to do is copy and Past is all there...I'm shure if you know how to to a Makro you can create one You just need to copy my File on Top of the Commentary and than something like

    Seek the text between

    cut and paste between

    I dit this ones with a Dictionary but cant remember how

  • Kolen Cheung
    Kolen Cheung Member Posts: 1,096 ✭✭✭

    Consider the difference between before and after you make the milestones. There is no magic way that can quickly make it go from the former to the later (with milestones.) Hence it is an inherently labor intensive process (That’s why Logos Research edition is so expensive.) All “writings“ are like that, as human writing is not like a computer program or data that has rigid structure to be exploit such that batch processing becomes possible. that said...

    you can try to find pattern, and if the pattern is in your favor, hence, you have a more or less structured data, you can exploit it to drastically reduce the labor you need. The find and replace example above is one.

    A more general tool, find and replace on steroid, is called Regular Expression, regex. It can handles generic pattern matching (again if you find any pattern at all.)

    there‘s a website teaching regular expression. If you only have 1 hour to learn something to speed this process up, regex might be a good thing to Learn.

    however mastering it is more difficult. And Eg Word doesn’t (or does it?) support regex so other conversion is needed.

    it really depends on how much time you are going to spend on PBB. if you are going to spend hundreds of thousands of hours to perfect them, learning a tool with dozens of hour can save you thousands in the end.

  • Michel Pauw
    Michel Pauw Member Posts: 585 ✭✭✭

    Thank you all, for your valuable suggestions! It sounds like it will still be a whole lot of work.

    Dell XPS 17 9700, W11, 32GB, 1TB SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060
    L5+L9+L10 Portfolio | Logos Max | Translator's Workplace

  • Ken McGuire
    Ken McGuire Member Posts: 2,074 ✭✭✭

    Having created a few Personal Books, I will fully admit that all the tagging to make the books work well is time consuming. I recommend doing it in small chunks, and also find a way to do a little of it while waiting between other activities.

    In addition, often the tagging is relatively mindless. It is just barely complex enough that I wouldn't really trust it too much to any macro I could write, and yet it is simple enough that I find I can do it while watching the TV or something. It is still a significant amount of time, but if the editorial work is in something you find interesting at all, you can find that there are worse ways to get to know a text. It may not be the most efficient way to study that text, but you will learn things about how that text is organized what they find important, favorite passages, etc.

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