Onyx Overview

What is Onyx?

The Onyx project is one way to use the new XML features of Microsoft Word 2003 (or later) to typeset Scriptures from Unicode USFM source documents, among other things. It can also be used as a way to preview Scripture portions for village checking in a reasonably nice format. It is also possible to use Onyx to help facilitate using Microsoft Word 2003 or later as a Scripture editor in some cases. The Onyx project also contains some programs to do other Bible file format conversions.

The current process looks something like this:

Paratext or other Bible translation editor
<->
USFM files
<->
Onyx
->
WordML + USFX
->
Microsoft Word 2003 + suitable PDF generation software
->
Printer-ready output (PDF or paper)


 






Layout template (WordML document) + options settings
->

USFX
->
Other file formats (RTF, .DOC, HTML, etc.) or import to other programs


In the near future, we plan to add the ability for Onyx to convert between some other Scripture file formats besides USFM and USFX.

Because Microsoft Office Word 2003 allows a custom XML schema to be attached to a WordML document, and custom XML tags embedded in that document, this provides a clean way to regenerate the USFM markup from the Word document after editing. USFM isn’t XML, but the USFM markup can be converted reasonably directly to an XML format and back using a schema that I call USFX (Unified Standard Format XML).

In addition to the simple Scripture publishing path mentioned above, the Onyx project is home for some other Scripture file format conversions, using USFX as the central hub of the conversions.

Onyx Philosophy

The philosophy behind Onyx is to:

In other words, Onyx does not (and cannot) change what Microsoft Word can do, but it can automate the creation of document features that would be exceedingly tedious and error-prone to create manually, such as creating the hidden tags for each verse used for updating the running headers.

System Requirements

To run this set of programs, you must be running Windows XP, 2000, or NT. It has only been tested with Windows XP, so strange things might happen on other versions of Windows. You must also have installed the .NET runtime package, which is available through Windows Update or run this Microsoft program (dotnetfx.exe) (mirrored here for Ukarumpians only) to install it.. You must also have installed Microsoft Word 2003 (or later). You can use some (but not all) features by using the freely downloadable Microsoft Office Word Viewer 2003 instead of the full word processor. This program cannot work with earlier versions of Microsoft Word, because it uses features introduced with Word 2003. SIL members are encouraged to contact JAARS for discount licensing arrangements.

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