[sword-devel] Suggestion

[Martin Gruner]

I have been on the sword-devel list for quite a while.
I am neither a theologian (not yet) nor a skilled programmer.

But i wanted to send you my (perhaps very stupid) ideas. So if this is trash,
just delete the mail and forget it.

As I understood, sword has its texts stored in different formats (rawtext,
rawcom, rawgbf...) in text files and those .vss index files.
Somebody on the list wished to get rid of indexing.

Would it be worth to consider the following thing: 
Why not build database files from the modules that could be accessed through
SQL for example(i think no indexing would be necessary then). That should
provide an easy interface for complex searches, and remove the necessity of
different formats within sword (though it would also be possible to store the
original formats inside the databases). One also could merge all the modules
that were downloaded by a specific user, and create one single database for
sword on that system, containing all the modules, commentaries etc. It might
also be possible to etraxt specific parts of the database (for example the
personal commentary). Sword could use one character encoding scheme within that
database (unicode?) which covers all the different languages etc., and then
change the text which is output to the system specific environment. Maybe that
could be the task of the frontends (bibletime).

Now you will have recognized that I do not really know what I am writing of
(unicode, sql....) I'm sorry for disturbing you if this is only trash, but i
did not get rid of the thoughts.

-- 
Martin Gruner
mg.pub@gmx.net