Actually, they could have had the weird German brother ask that question during the staged Q&A, that was the perfect opportunity to get it in there. I agree with sir82 that they must have felt it was too crass to bring up the dollar amount in the annual meeting.
Apognophos
JoinedPosts by Apognophos
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223
Comprehensive NWT Comparison Project (calling all technically skilled members)
by Apognophos inis anyone aware if this project is already being done by someone?
if not, perhaps we can brainstorm how to go about this, now that the pdf for the revised nwt is out.
a couple initial impressions:.
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Apognophos
Yes, I saw the PDF link to the 1984 version, but to be honest, the web version provides a much easier way of getting that text - no middle cross reference. If they would just put the NWTx2 on the web, I would get it from there and not the PDF...
Ah, okay. Well, by all means, if you prefer to grab the text from the browseable versions of the Bibles, we can just grab the 1984 version for now and put the project on hold until the new NWT appears there. I don't see this project as super-urgent, and they'll probably have it up soon anyway.
Apognophos, can you answer this: what type of changes would be interesting to you? What would constitute an interesting change? I have a feeling that question is a lot harder to answer than you think...
"I'll know it when I see it." :) I think step 1 needs to be done before I can even begin to figure out how to group/categorize the changes into something people want to see. But the short answer is that an interesting change is what you have left over after you filter out all the boring changes. My theory is that the boring changes can be summed up in a file with some simple pattern matching like my earlier example.
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223
Comprehensive NWT Comparison Project (calling all technically skilled members)
by Apognophos inis anyone aware if this project is already being done by someone?
if not, perhaps we can brainstorm how to go about this, now that the pdf for the revised nwt is out.
a couple initial impressions:.
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Apognophos
Well, as I mentioned in my first post ;) the Society made a ton of changes to streamline the wording. Past continuous tense verbs like "had been going" might become "went", etc. etc. Keep in mind that they took like 200,000 words out of the NWT (I forget the actual number now), so a lot of those changes will not be the slightest bit interesting and will inflate the size of the "Bible changes" document to the point where no one will be willing to read through it looking for the meaty bits. Thus, filtering is actually necessary if we're going to produce a useful changeset.
I do like the idea of outputting from a diff program, if we can get something that visually looks like what you see in the diff program itself. I haven't seen that done, so I didn't think of it.
I suggest concentrating on the web version of the 1984 edition first
You did see the PDF download link for the 1984 version, on the right there, right?
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223
Comprehensive NWT Comparison Project (calling all technically skilled members)
by Apognophos inis anyone aware if this project is already being done by someone?
if not, perhaps we can brainstorm how to go about this, now that the pdf for the revised nwt is out.
a couple initial impressions:.
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Apognophos
Yeah, that's the idea. The PDFs are thankfully textual (they'd be huge otherwise).
As far as viewing diffs, I am familiar with programs like WinMerge, but I wanted to produce something in a format that any interested party can read, without needing to install anything or have technical knowledge, so I was hoping to strain out the "boring" changes (but leave those available somewhere, perhaps, for anyone who does want to review them), and then concatenate all the remaining "interesting" change files together into maybe a single file for each book that anyone could read easily, like "Genesis.txt" containing:
1:1
In the beginning, God created the heavens and {the earth}.
In the beginning, God made the heavens and {stuff}.
1:2
The earth was {formless and void}, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.
The earth was {a big mess}, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved over the surface of the waters.
1:5 [the next verse with a change]
[..]
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223
Comprehensive NWT Comparison Project (calling all technically skilled members)
by Apognophos inis anyone aware if this project is already being done by someone?
if not, perhaps we can brainstorm how to go about this, now that the pdf for the revised nwt is out.
a couple initial impressions:.
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Apognophos
The challenge would be to build the program to get the output you desire.
There might be a challenge in teaching the initial PDF parsing program to filter out the cross-reference letters, but ultimately we're probably talking about some pretty basic code. I wrote a script once for converting XML to RTF and it was about as long as I possibly could make it, and it was only a couple hundred lines (it did use a third-party program, xsltproc, but I think we're talking about doing the same thing here, using a third-party PDF library for the basic parsing). Edit: Actually, the bigger challenge might be assembling the text in proper order, based on my simple experiment earlier where the PDF lines appeared to be out of order.
Once that occurs, it should only be tedious for the computer, not you.
I think the tedium will come from building the list of changes to filter out in step 2, but that's fine, I think I can handle it.
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223
Comprehensive NWT Comparison Project (calling all technically skilled members)
by Apognophos inis anyone aware if this project is already being done by someone?
if not, perhaps we can brainstorm how to go about this, now that the pdf for the revised nwt is out.
a couple initial impressions:.
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Apognophos
Oh, and I think the changes will need context so we can read them on their own. Each change file should probably be an entire verse, and saved in a file named for its location, i.e. if there are two changes in Genesis 1:1, the comparison program will save two text files called Genesis001-001a and Genesis001-001b, containing the same complete verse. Let's say that Genesis 1:1 used to read:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
and now it reads:
In the beginning, God made the heavens and stuff.
There are two changes, but "created" => "made" isn't very interesting so we will end up filtering that change out. What we do care about is the second, rather surprising change from "the earth" to "stuff". Thus, the file Genesis001-001a could contain this:
In the beginning, God {created} the heavens and the earth.
In the beginning, God {made} the heavens and stuff.
And the 'b' file could contain:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and {the earth}.
In the beginning, God made the heavens and {stuff}.
The braces mark the changes for our filtering program (which might just be a simple grep-and-mv script in Unix) to do its thing. Does that make sense?
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223
Comprehensive NWT Comparison Project (calling all technically skilled members)
by Apognophos inis anyone aware if this project is already being done by someone?
if not, perhaps we can brainstorm how to go about this, now that the pdf for the revised nwt is out.
a couple initial impressions:.
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Apognophos
Yeah, it's true that there are thousands of changes. Sorry if I made it sound like this would be a quick process. My thought was that first we would find a format for saving the changes (maybe a separate file for each change?), then we could sort out the simple ones that occur over and over, like the examples I gave earlier, and toss them into a folder like "Simplified Grammar".
Basically it would entail gradually building a list of each kind of change by hand, maybe with simple pattern matches. For instance, imagine a file called simple_grammar.txt containing:
Folder:Simplified Grammar
has declared=said
proceeded to *=*ed
As we build the list in simple_grammar.txt by looking through the changes we found, we repeatedly apply it to the original folder of changes until we see that only the interesting stuff is left in the main folder. In the end, there will still be hundreds of changes or more that interested readers will go through to see what the Society changed.
It will be a somewhat tedious process, but I've done far more tedious work in the past and I'm prepared to take the time to do that filtering part if we can first obtain a complete set of changes between the PDF texts.
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223
Comprehensive NWT Comparison Project (calling all technically skilled members)
by Apognophos inis anyone aware if this project is already being done by someone?
if not, perhaps we can brainstorm how to go about this, now that the pdf for the revised nwt is out.
a couple initial impressions:.
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Apognophos
Great, just the sort of person I was looking for! I program too, but I've never worked with PDF so I was first going to try basic stuff like copy-pasting and grepping or xsltprocing before I wrote an actual program, but if you've done this kind of thing before, you are probably the right guy for the job. Well, the new NWT's PDF is right at jw.org. The old one is still up for now at http://www.jw.org/en/publications/bible/nwt/books/
I imagine it won't be hard to filter out those pesky cross-reference letters?
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223
Comprehensive NWT Comparison Project (calling all technically skilled members)
by Apognophos inis anyone aware if this project is already being done by someone?
if not, perhaps we can brainstorm how to go about this, now that the pdf for the revised nwt is out.
a couple initial impressions:.
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Apognophos
Well, the PDFs I have are already textual. So we shouldn't need to do any conversion from images to text, but rather reformat the existing text. The question is just how to turn the two-column layout into text without those annoying cross-reference letters in there, since they were all changed in the new NWT and would ruin the comparison.
I forgot to note something important, which is that I did end up with some lines out of order, and I don't understand why:
Note that a couple lines are out of place. "Abel" and "from which he had been taken" are for some reason placed at the end of the page's markup. This problem appears to exist on other pages as well and is probably widespread. I don't know the PDF format well. I can only assume that each line has its own x, y coordinates as a part of the page, and this is how the lines can be out of order in the document markup.
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223
Comprehensive NWT Comparison Project (calling all technically skilled members)
by Apognophos inis anyone aware if this project is already being done by someone?
if not, perhaps we can brainstorm how to go about this, now that the pdf for the revised nwt is out.
a couple initial impressions:.
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Apognophos
I copied the PDF text from Preview into TextEdit on the Mac to get that result.
