[sword-devel] 1.52 & a request

[Martin Gruner]

Gentlemen,

May I ask what still has to be done before sword 1.52 can be released? It 
would be nice if the release would be before the 23th, otherwise we will have 
to offer a cvs snapshot for download to be used with BibleTime 1.0. This 
would be possible, but a official release would be nicer. Thank you for 
considering.

It seems to be my fate to be the one who is always asking strange questions 
and requesting new things. Sorry.
After 1.52 there should be a major change in the way modules are created. 
They should no longer be created based on FONTS (like symbol) which use a 
proprietary and fontspecific encoding. They should rather be created based on 
official ENCODINGS (e.g. iso8859-7 for greek). This way users can decide 
which font they want to choose. It will even be possible to use an unicode 
font to display every possible language. It is easy to map the standardized 
charsets into unicode in the frontends. But that does not work with 
fontspecific encodings.
Do you understand what I try to say? Imo this is something that should really 
happen, because it is just sensible.

I have just looked into my sword-devel archive. There has been a discussion 
in Feb 2000 concerning Unicode support in sword. Waves went high, but nothing 
happened until now. IMO moving to the correct language specific charset 
encodings would be a first step into this direction, and not a line in sword 
code would have to be changed, because we still stick to 1 Byte characters. 
Only some of the modules would have to be recoded, which could be done almost 
automatically using GNU recode, I guess.

Martin