Preparing Etexts for the CCEL
Electronic texts for the Christian Classics Ethereal Library are prepared in Microsoft Word with the use of paragraph styles and special codes inserted into the text. Learning to prepare texts according to these guidelines takes a few minutes, but it must be done by someone, and properly prepared texts tend to be added much more quickly. If you don't have Microsoft Word or would rather leave the formatting of the text to someone else and concentrate on typing or some other task, that would be fine. You could look at these few
simple guidelines for a small list of helpful suggestions.To format a document for the CCEL, you need to have Microsoft Word 97. You will need to apply paragraph styles and insert special codes into the text. The styles to be used and the macros are available in an RTF document,
@Styles2.RTF, which you can load into Microsoft Word. This document also serves as an example of text with CCEL markup and a description of how to use these styles. You may wish to print it out for reference.To format a document in Word, load Styles2.RTF into Word, press Ctrl-A to select all of the text, copy the text you are formatting, and paste it into Word, replacing the existing text. Then save it with a different name. The drop box on the left side of the formatting toolbar can be used to select paragraph styles and the buttons that appear on the special CCEL toolbar help with the insertion of special markup codes. Greek and Hebrew text can be included by entering the text in appropriate. To enter
Greek and Hebrew, you can use the excellent, free SIL Galatia and SIL Ezra from the Summer Institute of Linguistics.The paragraph styles have names such as Heading 1, Heading 2, BlockQuote, Address, Verse, Verse 2, etc. They are used to show the function of a paragraph. For example, chapter titles may be given the style Heading 2, and a hymn verse may use Verse and Verse2 (for indented lines). Codes are in the style of html codes, but they are not standard html. For example, the pb code (<pb/ n="3">) can be used to show that there was a page break in the print edition. They are shown in red, hidden text in Word.
When paragraph styles and codes have been inserted correctly, the text can be added to the CCEL more or less automatically. It is automatically converted to other formats such as multi-file HTML, plain text, and postript, and information about the text (title, author, index entries, scripture references, etc.) is inserted into a database. Then the index pages for the CCEL, the subject index, and the World Wide Study Bible can be automatically rebuilt to reflect the added book. And it will be available to millions of users around the world!