Asia Bible Society GNT Syntax Trees @ biblicalhumanities.org

[Jonathan Robie]

The boxed display of the syntax of NT setences is almost unusable for more complicated sentences.

Can you give me some examples where it breaks down for you? I kind of like it for complex sentences. I think I could create an SVG-based version that has the same advantages, putting the text on the left, growing the tree to the right, keeping analysis nodes as close to the text as possible rather than as close to the initial S as possible.

Tree display is much better. It would be nice if tree display would be accompanied with some highlighting functionality. That is, mousing over a word might not only display its morphological parsing, but also highlight the relevant higher nodes. Also mousing over some node might highlight relevant lower nodes. Also displaying different types of nodes in different colors might be helpful. Some functionlity of such kind has been implemented in Logos and Accordance Bible softeare packages.

SVG and tree display do have real advantages - easier to email, modify with an SVG editor, etc; allow interaction along the lines of what you describe above. I don't actually have a copy of either Logos or Accordance, I should find a way to play with them and learn from them.

[Jonathan Robie]

I really appreciate the feedback from David and Laisvūnas. I'm still playing with various ways of doing this, and learning more than I used to know about SVG. Here's a traditional tree presentation using SVG:

http://biblicalhumanities.org/sandbox/g ... g/test.svg

Here's a PNG version:



SVG allows animation on that.

David - if we had SVG, and you could edit it with a graphics editor, would you still need spreadsheet capabilities? I want to provide support for a small set of depictions, but I want to keep the number of presentations down to make it more supportable.

[David Lim]

David - if we had SVG, and you could edit it with a graphics editor, would you still need spreadsheet capabilities? I want to provide support for a small set of depictions, but I want to keep the number of presentations down to make it more supportable.

Well I was having those who can only handle text or tables in mind. I personally don't use an SVG editor so I won't know how useful it is for those who do. But I don't have a real need for such "complete" parse trees at the moment, so what I've suggested are just suggestions. And thanks for doing all these! But I think you should consider splitting the pages into chapters at least, since an entire book is too much for one page and takes some time to load.

[Jonathan Robie]

David - if we had SVG, and you could edit it with a graphics editor, would you still need spreadsheet capabilities? I want to provide support for a small set of depictions, but I want to keep the number of presentations down to make it more supportable.

Well I was having those who can only handle text or tables in mind. I personally don't use an SVG editor so I won't know how useful it is for those who do. But I don't have a real need for such "complete" parse trees at the moment, so what I've suggested are just suggestions. And thanks for doing all these! But I think you should consider splitting the pages into chapters at least, since an entire book is too much for one page and takes some time to load.

Yes, I agree that I should split it into chapters. Thanks for the feedback!

SVG editors are just graph editors, more or less, and some are available for free.