PBB Personal Book Builder & Still Truth Files & PBB

First, there's not much point in doing it until PBB is released. It's still in beta testing, so any files created with the current beta version of the PBB compiler will need to be recompiled after Logos 4.3 ships.

Second, the source files from which the Logos 3 (Libronix) PBB files were created would need to be available, because they would need to be run through the new compiler. Logos 4 will not read in old format PBB files directly. So the original folks who scanned or converted these documents and compiled them into PBB would need to come forward with their source files and make them available or compile them again for the old PBBs to work in Logos 4.

Third, we haven't yet been told about the pricing structure, whether PBBs that were free in the past can continue to be free, whether there needs to be a new licensing fee paid by the person who compiles and makes PBBs available for sharing, or what. We expect some sort of explanation about how all of that will work before 4.3 ships.

As Rosie indicated there is a need to gather source files.  

I started looking into that quite some time ago and will revise my efforts as PBBL4 comes closer to gold and the other questions get answers.

James Tetley said:

Rosie Perera said:

Logos 4 will not read in old format PBB files directly.

Sounds strange - any reason why Logos 4 can't do this - surely it would make sense to be able to convert the old format PBB into Logos 4 compatible PBB rather than needing the source files?? Wouldn't this seem to be the most 'obvious' solution.  Any comment from Logos on this - it seems a bunch of folk have put a lot of work into creating PBB files for Logos 3 which will have to be redone for Logos 4....

But perhaps I am missing something obvious??

The reason is Logos would have had to write special conversion code to convert Logos 3 format to Logos 4 format PBB files and they chose not to.

It's a much different (and easier) problem to convert source documents from one format to the next (e.g. Word 2007 can open Word 2003 file format). But to convert compiled code is nasty and I wouldn't want to try to solve that problem either. So I can sympathize with Logos for punting on it.

People don't have to redo all the work of creating the PBBs; all they have to do is recompile them which is as simple as clicking on the "Build book" button in Logos 4, as long as they kept the source document that they compiled the original one from.

If someone went to a lot of trouble to create a Word document of a public domain book (scanning the book, fixing up all the typos, doing all the formatting properly) and compile it into PBB format for Logos 3 using the old Libronix Personal Book Builder tool, it would have been kind of risky to then delete the Word document they'd worked so hard to create. But I suppose some people might have done so, figuring that the PBB book they'd created was permanent and they wouldn't need the source document anymore. (Or their computer might have crashed and they might not have had a backup of the Word document.) But Logos is assuming or hoping that most people who created PBBs in the past still have access to their source documents and can simply recompile them.

Hope that explains what you might have been missing in this whole conversation.

Thomas Black said:

 I haven't tested it yet either but would copying and pasting from an L3 book into Word.docx and finally importing into L4PBB bring a clean conversion?

Obviously we would lose milestones.

What if they wrote an addon for L3 that would implement "Export to .docx" for PBBs, and preserve milestones? That would be nice. I doubt they'll want to do it, though. They've pretty much washed their hands of L3, and it would take away valuable development time from L4.

MJ. Smith said:

Mark Smith said:

Timelines and now PBBs are the only ones I can think of. What have I forgotten?

Lectionaries and Parallels/Harmonies [or wasn't I supposed to be making them?] Graphics ... one could even create reading plans that don't translate over. Oops - I wasn't supposed to say that

Over to you, Tom.

Also workspaces don't get converted to layouts.

tom collinge said:

IMHO, Logos 4 has shown great disrespect to its users' data.

This is a good way to put it.  I feel the same way, I invested a lot of my time to develop software to create and generate daily lectionary readings, I had years worth of daily lectionary data that was not, nor is ever planned, to be converted across.  I thought this data would always be useful in future versions because it was a simple XML format of lectionary data.  So I am "compassionate", Tom (compassionate - "to suffer with"). In the software business one would think this would be the #1 priority, in my experience if a software product renders a users' data unable to be migrated to a future version, you just opened that customer up to an equal migration to any and all competitors.

I love Logos 4, but I won't forget soon how Logos has shown so little priority or interest in the data I worked so hard to create.

Rosie Perera said:

 

People don't have to redo all the work of creating the PBBs; all they have to do is recompile them which is as simple as clicking on the "Build book" button in Logos 4, as long as they kept the source document that they compiled the original one from.

I have the original source HTML files of all the PBBs I released on Stilltruth and as things stand now there is going to be some work with the tags and links, cleaning up around the xml as a result of bringing the file into Word and saving it as .docx., etc. I am still hopeful Logos will sort this out so that it is as easy as you say.

Rosie Perera said:

Rev Chris said:

Now that PBB is in beta, does anyone have an educated guess as to when the first stable release will come out?

Based on how long it's taken from first beta release of major new features to stable release, I'm guessing about 2+ months.

Based on the amount of feedback about PBB, I would say that it will be more than 3 months.  Still, this is just MHO.

David Mitchell made an interesting post in the Mac forum last Wednesday:

David Mitchell said:

If 4.3 is not complete by the time Lion is released, there will be a service release for 4.2b.

Sounds like there is at least some hope it might be finished before Lion ships.

Milford Charles Murray said:

Rosie, Moving my mouse through this post,  I accidentally hit your How to ask for Help link...                bad stuff there....  perhaps you've been hacked???

No, actually was using 3.ly URL shortener.  They went out of business a few months back and now their redirects aren't working.

Michael Lyman said:

Thomas, I have a specific question concerning Still Truth PBB's. I am especially interested in getting John Gill's works and would be happy to help convert them if there is a way I could. Thanks again for all of your hard work!!!

Joe Kreifels was the fine gentleman who first compiled the Gill Documents.  At the moment I believe Joe may yet have access to those original documents.  If he does I believe we'll be able to bring them right into L4 in due time.  

If, however, it turns out that the source documents are gone or corrupt,we may indeed need your assistance to bring it back to life.  :-)

James Tetley said:

What's your thinking on how the folks who originally created the pbb files will submit their original files for conversion??

I've started the conversation on this. At the moment we're still waiting to see what Logos comes up with for a distribution channel.  Whether or not there is a need to make the source documents available is not yet fully known - we'll see.