[sword-devel] Douai Version & Apocrypha

[Chris Little]

Adding Apocrypha support to SWORD would be a nice step.  I tried a while
back but something or other failed and it never worke correctly.  I did
include Apocrypha files for a number of translations I did modules for, but
probably not the Douay-Rheims or RSV, and I know not the KJV.  I would also
like to be able to add support for other extra-biblical texts of the
biblical genre--books like the books of Enoch, Jubilees, other
pseudepigrapha, apocryphal NT literature, etc.--which are so important in
certain fields of historical and scholastic study.  This could even be part
of the basis for adding general book support if we desired to go that route
(meaning we could store and retrieve data from regular books, not of
bible/commentary/LD types).

I don't however, think we should add a disclaimer.  Hopefully we're not here
to endorse specific translations or promote sectarian literature.  You'll
find plenty of that in the Online Bible's library of "official" books.
We're here to provide users with tools and texts to study for themselves.
Hopefully we can provide the Apocrypha, etc. and users who desire them can
take them or leave them, depending on whether they see them as valuable in
their own walk and/or work, viewing them as either historical, ispired,
spurious, or merely amusing.

The verse numbering structure used in the Douay-Rheims, NAB, and other
(generally) Catholic Bibles is another matter entirely.  The way I have
dealt with verse numbering variance thus far has been the only method
available to me.  I run the indexer, with a KJV in hand, and fix every
variance by hand, making the Catholic Bibles match the KJV verse numbering.
Right now, the verses per chapter and chapters per book are stored in a
sinlge array and used between all translations (and commentaries).  This
should make parallel display work fine, since the KJV, DR, etc. should all
display corresponding verses when queried.  Unfortunately, this means a
large number of verses in the DR, NAB, etc. are actually being misnumbered.
This is especially problematic in Daniel and Esther, where much additional
material was added, and in Psalms, which uses a somewhat different verse
numbering scheme.  The ideal fix is to use a method like Logos or
Hermeneutika (in BibleWorks) use that recognizes different verse mappings
and can convert between them, but implementing this would be a lot of work I
suspect.

--Chris Little