Books for Introduction to the Bible/Old Testament/New Testament

Question

As we come to publish the NT, I’m a little surprised that the list of possible books in PT does not include:

• Introduction to the Bible
• Introduction to the Old Testament
• Introduction to the New Testament

Of course, we could use XXA–XXC (though the limit of seven extra books is quite constraining!)

Is there a best practice for where to place these introductions?

Answer 1

FRT is for Book title, copyright information and table of contents… OTH is for book front cover and book spine. TDX is for topical index.

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Comments

anon044949:

FRT is for Book title, copy-write information and table of contents…

Did you mean copyright? Or does “copy-write” have a special meaning? I’m just asking, not trying to be picky.

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Well, it was what the spell checker gave me. I suppose it should have been copyright even if my spell checker doesn’t know the word.

Answer 2

Use the INT book for all intros. Within that book, use a \periph statement between the different intros as in

\periph Bible Intro

\periph OT Intro

\periph NT Intro

The periph statement breaks these into three separate “books” in Indesign that you move to their proper places.

Answer 3

From https://ubsicap.github.io/usfm/peripherals/index.html#periph-div :

For peripheral books containing divisions, the division title is free-form, and may be expressed in the vernacular language. Whenever possible, a peripheral identifier should be associated with a \periph division marker. A set of standardized identifiers allow software processes to easily select content for recognized peripheral divisions. The syntax for peripheral identifiers follows the syntax for word level attributes: attribute = “value”. The attribute name is id. The value is wrapped in quotes.

“may be expressed in the vernacular language” – does that mean my NT introduction should start:

\periph Пешгуфтори Аҳди нав|id=“intnt”

… or should I be typing:

\periph New Testament Introduction|id=“intnt”
\mt1 Пешгуфтори Аҳди нав

Or should I actually leave out the part after the pipe symbol (vertical bar)?

Perhaps the description in the USFM manual could be made a little clearer here. And/or the example could be for a Bible in a language other than English.

Comments

Can anyone help on this?

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anon848905 is correct, the \periph statement appears nowhere in the final publication. So one key for me as the typesetter is I need to understand the purpose for each periph book as I build my publication. If everything is in a foreign language and there are multiple periphs then I have difficulty keeping track of them in my publication. I therefore always instruct my teams to provide English periph statements. I’ve lost the beginning thread of this conversation and am wondering why you would want them in the vernacular?

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Does this \periph statement get transferred over to the book submenus for apps made with SAB? That may be a reason to want the statements in the vernacular, if that is the case.

Answer 4

wdavidhj,

Whether or not you use the freeform words depends on your needs. The text that follows the marker \periph is used by Publishing Assistant create the name of the book - this is NOT printed anywhere, but is used by the programs to identify the text. The freeform text helps the translator know what the section is about.

IF you need this to be in the idiom then you can use
\periph Пешгуфтори Аҳди нав|id=“intnt”

For me, I work mostly with Spanish teams so I could put these words in Spanish or English and it really doesn’t matter. If I’m working with a translator who doesn’t speak English, then I would probably put this in Spanish to help them identify this section of text as the intro to the nt.

This is particularly important when you have a number of \periph statements in the same file. This would help the translator identify the sections, but you MUST use the pipes to make sure that Publishing Assistant knows what “book” to create. Each periph will be used to create a separate book in InDesign.

Ask again if this doesn’t answer your question.