David Cox's How to Use e-Sword MEd

Overview

First of all, go to Craig White's e-Sword pages and download e-Sword MEd. While you are at, download e-Sword FIn also, and see my how to page on that here.

http://www.craigwhite.net/e-Sword_Utilities.asp

If you want a direct link to the downloads, click on these and save to your hard drive.
http://www.craigwhite.net/craignew/e-Sword/Utilities/MEd.zip
http://www.craigwhite.net/craignew/e-Sword/Utilities/FIn.zip

At the time I am writing this html page, the current version of MEd is 0.1.19.

Introduction

Let me say that this program is a utility program. What is the difference between a regular program and a utility program? A commercial program like Microsoft Word is expensive, exhaustive, and well planned, well documented, etc. A utility program is just a simple program designed to do something. That means the documentation is little (here it is basically nil), and it just does whatever it is supposed to do. I still get run time errors when using this software. When it happens, it will shut done the program and give you an error dialog box. Don't worry, you probably only lost the last thing you did. Once you move the record pointer (from one entry/chapter/dictionary entry/etc) to another, it is automatically saved. Just open the program again and load the program again and start off where you left off.

Opening Screen Capture (when you open the program)

Notice that there are a line of stuff on the top.

"Module" - This is where the name of the currently loaded Module will appear when you load one.

Load Existing Module - This will present you with a dialog box for opening a file. Note that you will need to click on the drop down box (triangle in the right side of the first field below. (My Windows XP is in Spanish so there will be some differences between an English XP version and this image below. "Buscar en" = "Find in", "Nombre" = "Name", and "Tipo" = "Type").

From here you will need to select the type of e-Sword module file you are looking for. This dialog box is going to default open in your default e-Sword folder. Now you should see something like the image below. Note again that in Spanish Windows XP, my default program folder is C:\Archivos de Programa\etc and in English it should be C:\Programs\etc. I created a TOP Module named delete, and entered 5 Chapters.

Properties of Current Module - Each module has basically at least two databases. One has the information to be displayed and the other has a small one entry database with information about the module. Here you can edit this information.

What you see at left is the following:

ID: The actual record number of the database. I made #1 and then deleted it, so Chapter 1 is actually record #2.

Count: The record number out of the total number.

Title: The title of the chapter.

Comments: This is the actual information you will see in the Topic file. This information is just plain text, but it can also be RTF formatted text. More about that later.

Let's go through the interface then we will look at images different file types set up here.

Create new Module - This is to create a new module from nothing. Note that most people will never use this program as an "editor" program to create a book or work. The smart thing to do is to use Microsoft Word (or whatever) edit it how you want it, and when it is totally finished, then open this program and copy and paste from your Word Processor into this program.

Create through Downloading a RTF file into a Module - If you use a Word Processor that can save files to RTF, then you can import them using this interface. The advantage of doing it this was is that you can format to your heart's content, and most of it will come over into e-Sword format. Always remember, not everybody has your fancy fonts, so results are unpredictable if you don't use standard Windows fonts. What that means for Greek and Hebrew is anybody's guess.

Okay so click on this icon and this image should be what you see.

You are going to create a module from an RTF file. (The file needs to already exist of course.) Let's make a test file. Note that only Bibles (from a plain text file) or TOPics (from an RTF file) are currently supported. Dictionary and Commentary files are not supported at present. So let's make a delete2.top file here.

This is going to be your import work window.

Cancel - is to cancel here (abort and lose all work).

Instead of following the order Craig White has it, let's look at the Add icon first.

Add - I just added some RTF files in my folder and put Chapter 1, 2, 3 etc before them. This is what you see when you add.

This is how you add an RTF file as a chapter in your book. The + and - space just adds a space before the title. I don't know why he put this in here to tell you the truth.

Here everything to the left of the greater than sign ">" is going to the a chapter title, and to the right is where it is importing it from.

Now the rest makes more sense.

Edit - Is going to get you the same dialog box as Add, where you can change things.

Delete - This is going to delete one of the chapters.

Done - Finished editing save and leave.

Help - This is Craig's Help file. It is basically a version of changes, and absolutely no help in how to use the program.

Exit -  This exits you out of the program

 Add Entry - Add a new entry. (I have gotten runtime errors clicking this button with a previous version. To solve that if it happens make sure you move to a record you didn't just create and then create an additional new record.)

 Delete Entry - Delete the highlighted entry (make sure you have one highlighted or you might get a runtime error and get thrown out of the program).

This & All - These actions will work on just the record you have loaded, or on "all" on the entire book.

Versify - The one feature of e-Sword that makes it better than other commercial Bible software is the ability to make verse references into popup tooltips. On this one, Rick Meyers was a genius. You can convert references into tooltip references manually when you make the original file. There is no great secret here, just use the same 3 letters of the book of the Bible that e-Sword uses (left most panel in the e-Sword program where you navigate to a Bible passage) and put and underscore and the chapter:verse. or chapter:verse-verse. E-Sword will not display a tooltip if the reference is more than one single chapter. Doing this manually is possible before making it into a module, but it is time consuming. Here versify will do it for you. I have had some problems with it not putting the correct RTF code for green and underline, but completely acceptable anyway.

Search and Replace - This will allow you to change things within the module, and this is especially handy for replacing RTF code.

Strip Tags - This will remove all RTF formatting tags from the text.

In general RTF is a whole different disaster when it comes to making things work. RTF is problem ridden. But that is Microsoft's problem (like they don't have money to fix a decent universal document format, or they don't have the brains to do it. Get real.) But in general, it is easier to make a RTF file formatted how you want it in Microsoft Word and just import the thing. Note that in RTF, there is more than one way to get the same formatting features. In other words you can hard code something with the code around every place you want "green underline text", or you can set it up with a special file specific abbreviation at the beginning of the document (in this case I think it is at the beginning of the chapter), and use the abbreviation. At least that is my conclusion because if you examine files, they show the same thing but don't have the same code underlying it. Crazy!

I am no brain in the RTF department, and I shudder even thinking of trying to learn it. (I have investigated enough to know it is a mess.) But if it will save you some time, I have a 4x6 card taped to my computer screen with the following:

Green Underlined Verse Reference: {\cf11\ul Book_chapter:verse}
New Paragraph: \par
Tab: \tab
Bold: \b - to turn bold on, \b0 to turn bold off (that is a zero, not an "o")
Italic: \i - turn italics on, \i0 to turn italics off
SmallCaps: \scaps - turns small caps on, \scaps0 - turns smallcaps off.

Sorry I cannot help you more on the RTF side of things. You will have to use trial and error, and if you discover things, send me an email telling me what you find and I will publish it if I think it is worthwhile for everybody to know. E-Sword does not recognize the complete RTF codes, it only handles a subset of them. I am no expert in this area, but I do not think this is a necessarily a limitation that Rick Meyers has put into e-Sword but is most probably a limitation that Microsoft has in using their own horrible Access format files instead of a more robust format in their language. I would guess Rick is using something like C++ for writing e-Sword although I have never seen a statement that would lead me to that conclusion.