Notice of Pending End of Availability

The Support Staff here have kept the software associated with these web pages running, through various hardware and software upgrades, in honour of Tony's memory since his death in 2000. However, we have reached the point where we can no longer guarantee to maintain this service - as such we are advising users that it could disappear at any time.

Fortunately, Jonathan Kimmit has very kindly offered host the facility on his Web site.

For anyone who would like a copy of the software to install on their own Web server, a version can be downloaded as a zipped tarfile. This tarball dates from 2005, and is based on Slackware 10 Linux using the 2.6 kernel, so if you intend to try to install it under a more recent version of Slackware, or under some othe operating system, you will have to be prepared to undertake some porting work. Unfortunately, we are unable to offer assistance or advice with this, but Jonathan Kimmit has set up a A Yahoo! group to act as as forum in which those who encounter difficulties with porting the software can assist one another.

We believe that various other resources, similar in nature, are now available - the Bible Research Web site contains links to a number of these.

Introduction

• Unlike packages such as ``Logos'', you don't need to install it: if you are reading this page using any graphical web browser (e.g. Netscape or Internet Explorer), you can browse the GNT.

• You don't need any Greek fonts. The text is rendered as images (GIF files), normally one for each verse. This gives you good-quality text - much better than several widely-used installable fonts - with no effort on your part.

• Subject to the limitations imposed by limited bandwidth, the system is fast. Several levels of cacheing are employed, on both server and client. Consequently, in most circumstances only a few kilobytes of data need to be transferred for each request. The worst case is requesting a complete chapter for the first time (e.g. John 1 is sent as a 110 kbyte data stream), but even this causes only a short delay in most cases. Because of the cacheing, speed tends to increase as you use the system.

• The system does not use JavaScript, Java, client-side image maps, or any other recent enhancement to HTML or browser technology. I'm by no means averse to using new features - I'm not a ``technophobe'' - but there are severe and often unacknowledged problems of incompatibility and inefficiency which I wanted especially to avoid in this project. For example, client-side image maps would seem to be ideal for implementing selection; but this feature proved to be unacceptably slow, at any rate on the browser on which I tested it.

• There is a search facility. You can search for a given word; for a word occurring close to another given word; for a word with a given root (base or lemma); and you can limit the search by grammatical category. Examples:
  • Find all perfect imperatives. (There are 4 of them.)
  • Find all plural forms of a particular word.

  The search facility is fast, simple and self-explanatory.

• You specify Greek input by typing a Latin transliteration on the keyboard; e.g. kalos for ... sorry, I can't display that in Greek here! The Latin-to-Greek transliteration is simple; it's based on that used by the ``Perseus'' system, but is slightly more forgiving of mis-spellings. The transliteration is defined here.

Caveat

The system is in its early stages, and it has a few deficiencies of which I am aware (and, no doubt, many more which are obvious to you, the reader).

Instructions

If you click on a Greek word, it will turn red and a table will appear, giving information about the word, including its root and grammatical category.

(If you are using Netscape, the table will appear near the top of the window. When using Internet Explorer, for some reason the automatic positioning doesn't work, and you have to scroll down to the selected word yourself.)

Source