[jsword-devel] Displaying Strongs Numbers

[DM Smith]

On Feb 2, 2008, at 1:45 AM, Keith Watson wrote:

>
> I created a new bug report BD-119 about displaying Strongs numbers  
> in the
> link text.  The existing bug report, BD-112, went way beyond just  
> showing
> the actual numbers.  It talked about showing the Hebrew/Greek words,  
> and
> even talked about tooltips.  The current scheme displays a counter  
> of the
> form Sx where the number x starts at one and increments for each  
> Strongs
> number displayed in the view.  This is what is shown for the plain  
> text in
> each link.  It is not human readable since it does not tie into actual
> Strongs numbers.
>
> What was the reasoning behind doing this instead of showing the actual
> Strongs number?


The reasoning was that Strong's numbers themselves should be  
meaningless. For the most part of the 8000 numbers, people can only  
identify a small handful, such as G3588 and H3068. (In Greek, if you  
were to learn 285 words then you'd know 90% of the occurring words in  
the NT.)

Hovering over them show the number in the status bar. The problem is  
that the user can hide the status bar and then they are not visible.

Not showing them makes the display simpler. And it improves  
performance a little bit as Java's HTML rendering is very poor.

>
>
> If the counter version is necessary, should there be an option to  
> choose
> which way to show it?

The counter version is not necessary. Enough people have said that  
they don't like it. We used to have it the way you want, but I changed  
it as a matter of my personal preference. :)

You are welcomed to submit a patch to either change it back or to add  
a choice toggle between the two (probably in options and not the view  
menu) or show a tooltip with the info.

What ever we do for Strong's numbers we should also do for morphology.

I find that Bible Software is about personal preference and what I  
call work flow. The different Sword applications have different ways  
of doing things. For the most part they reflect what we as developers  
want.

>
>
> My preference would be to show the actual Strongs number since it is  
> then
> available for looking it up by hand, copying to another document,  
> etc.  I
> have tested it in a local build.  The attached picture is an example  
> of the
> output.  The result is human readable and the few extra characters  
> do not
> seem to clutter the text.

The difference between the OT and the NT is very significant in the  
KJV. The OT came from either ThML or GBF which had the Strong's  
numbers between words and referred to what was previous. So basically  
when it was converted to OSIS, in which <w> is a container, we took  
everything from the last Strong's number as pertaining to the next.  
This is not exactly correct. In the OT, only some of the Hebrew were  
tagged.

For the KJV NT, this was done entirely by CrossWire, taking a Greek  
text that had every word with a Strong's number and with a team of  
people tagging the text, we have all the Strong's numbers in the NT.

The visual result for the NT is quite a bit different than the OT.  
Turning on Morphology at the same time makes it very busy.

>
>
> Input would be greatly appreciated.

For changes like this it is best to discuss them here first.

Your patches are greatly welcomed.

Working together for His kingdom,
	DM Smith