[sword-devel] New BibleCS alpha

[Chris Little]

...emphasis on the alpha.

David Trotz and I have got some new stuff built into Sword.  David's
stuff is pretty stable, mine is sometimes crashy. :)

David has started work on autosaving layouts.  Maybe we should also
autosave GlobalOptionsFilters settings also, if that's easy to add.

He also added a Tools | Install Manager menu item to launch InstallMgr
from BibleCS, as requested.  Now we're cool and we can say we have a
built in update manager like Logos' & BibleWorks' latest editions.  Yay.
:)  I know, it's kinda silly because we had this a couple years before
them.

My primary addition was to link in the ICU stuff and get the
transliterators working in BibleCS.  (Thanks largely to Troy walking me
through some of the additions to BibleCSMgr.)  This is extremely crashy
still.  Partly this is due to buggy transliterators from ICU but partly
it's due to some buffer overflows in sword that I'm still working on
(caused by cramming large scripts into places formerly occupied by small
scripts, like Latin to Tamil transliteration).

There are lots of under-the-hood modifications to sword that I'll
discuss in my next email.

I also made an initial effort to implement right-to-left rendering for
Hebrew, Arabic, & Syriac.  My conclusion is that Microsoft sucks.  Their
ineptitude is startling.  My changes work perfectly on Windows 2000 & XP
for scripts that are already recognized as right-to-left (Hebrew &
Arabic).  Syriac on Win2K/XP and all 3 scripts on Win9x still render
backwards.  What's worse, I don't believe there is any way to disable
automatic reversal in Win2K/XP, so that we could avoid detecting which
version of windows is running and simply reverse all 3 scripts
uniformally on MS platforms.  I'll keep looking for solutions, but my
best advice would be to get Win2K if you are using Win98 (not XP, which
seems to be a downgrade from Win2K) though Syriac will still render
backwards.

As usual, report bugs... but this time, don't report any bugs about the
transliterator filter.  You can always set it to the None option to
disable.  Also, the transliteration TO Latin should work fairly well.

--Chris