[sword-devel] 1.52 & a request

[Martin Gruner]

I may be requesting something that is not sensible.
But could you please explain that to me rather than just being silent on it? 
I think this is a serious problem with this development-related list. Many 
valuable comments and questions of various people just die in silence, often 
especially development related stuff.
It is imo also not helpful if the real core development is done by very few 
people who communicate directly with each other. People on this list do not 
know who is working on what, what can be done, where can somebody help etc.

I mean no offense to anybody. But maybe you can think about how to handle 
this in future. IMO communication and transparency will be essential for this 
project to expand, especially for integrating new volunteers. (Btw, using 
some of the sourceforge possibilities is a good way to do that.)

Martin

> 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