[jsword-devel] parallel display with WLC

[DM Smith]

On May 2, 2008, at 9:13 AM, Peter von Kaehne wrote:

> DM Smith wrote:
>
>>>> Second:
>>>> Parallel view is biased toward the first Bible. It uses the  
>>>> settings
>>>> for that Bible to display the rest. Presuming that you have set per
>>>> language or per book fonts, (say Arial for ESV and Ezra for  
>>>> Hebrew),
>>>> if ESV is first then WLC will use Arial, but if WLC is first then  
>>>> ESV
>>>> will use Ezra.
>>>>
>>>> I may be able to get this fixed with this release. I have entered a
>>>> "bug" for this:
>>>> http://www.crosswire.org/bugs/browse/BD-127
>>>>
>
> The font problem Daniel describes has some other unpleasant  
> consequences
> if one uses several non-latinate languages at the same time;
>
> 1) if the languages are not represented all in teh same font parts of
> teh display won't work and display instead boxes.. e.g: try using a
> Hebrew, Armenian and Farsi Bible at the same time - this is a very
> realistic thing as many Iranian pastors are Armenians
>
> 2) Arabic/Farsi ligation can go out of the window: If the dominant
> Bible's font does not have ligated Farsi glyphs then the text is badly
> displayed.
>
> The work around obviously is not to have certain Bibles in parallel  
> but
> use separate tabs.

Another problem is that if the first language is l-to-r and later ones  
are not, Java does not guess correctly how to do r-to-l.

The solution to both of these is that we need to pass in a set of  
parameters for each Bible being displayed and apply it to each column.

I've started on it and it is not nearly as easy as I had hoped.  
Basically, I need to add xml:lang="xx" to each OSIS element (that  
differs from the parent) and then in the xsl, I need to convert that  
to dir="rtl" or dir="ltr"

The font needs to be applied in a similar fashion. The difficulty is  
that I need to pass in a font for each Bible in the parallel display  
and apply it.

The trick is that HTML tables are not built by column by column but  
row by row. So as the row is built for a verse we create cells for  
each translation, each with it's own font and direction. Likewise, the  
OSIS table is row oriented, but does not retain any version  
information for each row.

So that's the task.

Because there is a work around, I've not worked on it. But if I can  
get it done before Troy releases the CD, I'll get it in.

DM