[jsword-devel] Future Direction for BibleDesktop

[DM Smith]

Adam Thomas wrote:
>
>
> Peter von Kaehne wrote:
>>> I am quite familiar with "rich" HTML rendering in desktop applications,
>>> however if a user wants a web application, they will use one. Check 
>>> out:
>>> http://www.ebible.com/ for an example of what I am trying to say. There
>>> are tons and tons of web-based applications to read the Bible. With Web
>>> 2.0 and 3.0 and AJAX, etc etc etc they can feel just like desktop
>>> applications complete with persistence. Why bother creating a desktop
>>> Bible application simply to embed web technologies? I personally don't
>>> see the benefit.
>>>     
>>
>> I am not at all sure whether I foillow you here. The reason for the
>> search for a new renderer is related directly with serious deficiencies
>> of the current one - inability to display several scripts at the same
>> time, inability tod eal adequatly with complex scripts. Anything
>> replacing the current way of rendering needs to be better. This has
>> little or nothing to do with creating a webapplication.
>>   
>
> Maybe I am the one who isn't understanding. I wasn't meaning that 
> BibleDesktop is a web application. Are you guys referring to embedding 
> an HTML renderer so you can do things like create links in the 
> scriptures and have rich content displayed in the Bible texts?
>
> I agree that better alternatives should be pursued, I just want to 
> better understand what you are trying to do.
We use an embedded HTML renderer. It is Sun's Java HTMLEditorKit. It 
does not do BiDi correctly nor does it do complex unicode character 
combining. This editor derives from the mother of all Java editors. All 
of them share the same flaws.

Our goal is to fix the display of Farsi/Arabic/... and other RtoL 
scripts. To handle complex scripts such as Myanmar. To eliminate the 
hacks we have in using the HTMLEditorKit.

Basically our architecture is that we convert modules in whatever the 
format they are in (GBF, ThML, PlainText, OSIS) into OSIS. Then using 
xslt, we transform that into HTML and hand that to a renderer. We have a 
custom onclick listener for link activations, which allows us to look up 
Strong's Numbers, Morphology entries, cross references and the like.

It's not that we want to embed a web application into BibleDesktop. But 
rather we want to use the strengths of those browsers to render text. If 
we can leverage other features, that would be great.

One such leveraging is to allow a right-click (or equivalent) on a word 
or selection, to pop up a menu of actions that are appropriate for that 
selection. If it is a word, to popup a definition from the user's 
default dictionary and also to offer other options.

In evaluating embedding HTML editors, we want it to work well with Swing 
or whatever platform we move to. The problem I have had in my 
experiments is that lightweight Swing does not play well with 
heavy-weight browsers.

In Him,
    DM