A real blast from the past : Shoebox ITS

[TonyNaden]

Is there any simple way of processing Shoebox interlinear *.ITS files with modern applications?  Either directly or Search/Replacing  field markers with something else?

[gmail]

Hi,

Perl, Python, JavaScript and other languages can all do the trick I imagine, but you could also use Microsoft Word. MS Word “wild cards” are really regular expressions, just MS Word’s variant of them. Nonetheless, they’re pretty powerful and very handy if you have just a few files to process. No need to fire up Jupyter or anything. Google MS Word regular expressions, and you should find some tutorials. Hope that helps. Good luck! All the Best!

Sent from my iPhone

On Apr 8, 2026, at 11:12, TonyNaden <lostma...@gmail.com> wrote:

Is there any simple way of processing Shoebox interlinear *.ITS files with modern applications?  Either directly or Search/Replacing  field markers with something else?

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[Karen Buseman]

Tony, I don't remember what the .ITS structure is. Can you send me one?

Karen

Toolbox Support

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[Henry Kammler]

Hello there,

isn’t this from a 1990s utility? The extension *.its (that I know of) is an auxiliary file in the process of generating a TEX version of properly layouted interlinear text using the program "itfprep32.exe". It used pre-UNICODE Shoebox interlinear texts (*.itx) as input and generated a *.tex output, and from there usually a PDF.  If I’m right, *.its-files do not contain the actual data.

I wish there was a similarly straight-forward conversion tool for later Toolbox versions because exporting from Toolbox to RTF is always a bit messy and requires manual editing. 

For adapting older interlinear texts into Toolbox, you can either use a search-replace routine in a text editor like Notepad++ (it can process several files at once; Word with plain text does the same but only individual files) or you create a new interlinear database type with the existing marker set of your old Shoebox files.

Cheers,
Henry

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[Tony Naden]

Sorry, as usual I shout for help and then look more calmly and work on a way through: it's sfm output and I only want a few fields, not aligned, so I can make my own Database Type in Toolbox and then export the fields I want and use the sort of available formatting tools you suggest which is what I usually end up doing.

Only 'Chaz' suggestions: I learned programming on FORTRAN2 in 1969 and used Basic, but made a choice which proved long-term bad and in the 80s. put all my eggs in the basket of PTP which was so much more intuitive as being dedicated to text processing: It served me well in processing the editing and formatting of a |New Testament, but then it didn't get updated for Unicode and ceased to be developed, so I was stuck.  Never had the time and energy to start from scratch on the Java/Perl/Python route.

Thank you all for your prompt replies and encouragement.

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[gmail]

@Tony, You’re welcome! Toolbox peeps are so nice, like you!

@Henry, oh my gosh! +1 for Notepad++ recco. I completely forgot about it and how powerful it is. Thanks for jogging my memory. Forgetting a lot since I retired some years ago!

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On Apr 9, 2026, at 06:12, Tony Naden <lostma...@gmail.com> wrote:



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