At church, we’re between regular computers for the projection system (OpenSong) we use for liturgy, song lyrics and other things we want to put up on the screen. The computer we used to use had a terminal hard drive failure a few weeks ago (a clicking sound when you try to boot is never a good sign) and the replacement we have coming will be another week or two (a donated machine so we have to wait for it to be cleared down and made ready). Meanwhile, we’ve been using the old machine designated as “worship pastor’s laptop” and I’ve been discovering a few things that will be useful in future. For example, it is quicker to create a “set” at home and transfer changed files than to start from scratch in situ at the church on a smaller, slower computer, or that it looks very likely that my idea of storing using an online synchronisation service to store all the data will make it easier still to minimise machine-based issues in future.

When the original drive went down, I fortunately had a fairly recent manual backup but one thing that didn’t make it across was our collection of Bibles. I’ve got the indexes but I wonder if the source files were stored in some non-standard location and so escaped my copying? I’ll figure out how to get new ones when the new machine is in place but, for now, I’m manually copying and pasting the passages we use each week. That has flagged up its own issue though. When I copy the short excerpts from BibleGateway, they include fancy characters for things like quotation marks which don’t display well when pasted into OpenSong.

I had been manually stripping them out but, with Sunday’s readings having an above-average amount of dialogue, I decided it was time to remind myself of how to do that task more quickly. I always go via the graphical interface of the vim editor, which is a brilliant text processing tool and I’ve already got methods for things like stripping out the verse numbers. For special characters, it turns out that I can copy them by positioning the cursor and typing vy in command mode. I can then run a search and replace and access what I have just put in the copy register by pressing <CTRL-r>” (ie. <CTRL-r><SHIFT-2> on a Windows box). I can then type in a suitable plain-text replacement and vim will do its thing.

If I was going to be doing a lot more of this, I could find more efficient ways of doing it, such as a macro (short helper program) to do all of my editing tricks in order. Since it shouldn’t be long before we get the regular tool to insert scriptures back (to help if someone other than me needs to set up a service) I don’t think I’ll bother but I’m jotting the trick down here for reference in the next couple of weeks and if I have a similar need for a different project further down the line.