Is there a way that any of us can suggest additions to USFM? For example, I had a couple of ideas recently …
One is a marker to quote text literally – text that would otherwise be interpreted as a marker or special character (e.g. when you want a project to contain the text “http://…”) – see my brief discussion of it here: Guide: File > Print Draft .
Another would be a clause-divider marker: in the language I work in, we often have long sentences with no commas. In a SAB-built* app with text highlighting at a phrase level during audio playback, it would be nice to be able to divide a long sentence into two or three with a marker that aeneas† would treat as punctuation. Though I guess we could use a hidden space, and tell aeneas that this is a punctuation character; or, if we wanted a visible character, we could use, say, a hash (#), and then have PrintDraftChanges.txt remove hashes at publication time.
But if we had a marker for this, we might also have a marker for no-clause-divide: our language also sometimes has sentences with far too many commas, and that looks silly when an SAB app reads the text. With this marker, you could mark a comma or other punctuation mark so that it is ignored by aeneas.
* Scripture App Builder
† aeneas is a program that automatically calculates the timings of the punctuation marks that you select. It was developed for use with SAB. The same markers I’m suggesting could also be used by teams that mark the timings manually: in this case the punctuation marks (and, in my suggestion, also markers) divide up the script that SAB outputs, and which aids the person listening to the audio.
