[sword-devel] win32 beta Z

[Christian Renz]

>Added new 'on word' glossary/general dictionary popup support (off by 
>default)

Wow, very nice idea! And it even works with Chinese characters (well,
single characters)! I noticed two bugs, though:

- The "title" of the entry that is displayed is till what is looked-up
  or typed, rather than the entry's key. Using Webster's on the
  Chinese bible also leads to strong desires :-)

- The chinese characters and some of the tone marks (those not in
  iso8859-1) are not displayed correctly in the pop-up, although they
  are when looking up in the dictionary (Win98)

Now, let me make a suggestion... Actually, I'd prefer if you used the
currently selected dictionary. Because when I am reading an English
bible, I want to use Webster's. When reading the Chinese bible, I'd
like to use the Chinese dictionary. When reading the Spanish
bible... well, you get the idea.

Of course, we could add Bible/Commentary-to-Lexicon links, but I think
that would be too troublesome. Just using the currently selected
dictionary should be good enough -- and is also more flexible.

Second suggestion -- I never really liked the popup. Sorry for
suggesting a major software redesign here :-) but popups are best for
very short notices, like 5-15 words, and preferably one line.

Some of the dictionary entries are rather long, and you can't read
everything because you can't scroll, plus you can't move your mouse
pointer out of the way because then the popup disappears -- the whole
thing is too fragile for my taste. If we had an MDI interface, I would
suggest adding a button to open a "linked" dictionary window. Because
we don't have, I suggest linking the one and only dictionary window we
have upon selection of the menu item (that is, I think it should be a
menu item like strong's, rather than a config option).

I think the same could work nicely for Strong's numbers also, only
that switching on strong's would override the current dictionary to
the selected Strong's dictionary. 

I'm being a typical user here -- I like the feature a lot, but if it
were a bit different, I'd like it even more :-). At least for chinese,
it would be quite useful, because you can only look up one character
at a time (there are no spaces between words in Chinese). Were it
looked up in the dictionary window, I could easily scroll in the
definitions to see all the words that start with the current
character.

And even another comment -- I don't like the fact that the look-up is
done on mouse-over, I'd prefer to click to lookup Strong's, dictionary
etc. (so that the definition wouldn't go away as soon as I move the
mouse cursor). (btw, I don't have any Windows API documentation here,
but I'll try out about locating the current position in a RichEdit
control w/o setting the cursor.)

Take these as what they are -- personal opinions. I hope others will
share their opinion as well so that we can have a more balanced view. :-)

>Fixed external commentary module support
>Split popup hints into categories.

Could you explain these? 

Greetings,
  Christian

-- 
crenz@web42.com - http://www.web42.com/crenz/ - http://www.web42.com/

"Our passions are not too strong, they are too weak. We are far too
easily pleased."  -- C.S. Lewis