[sword-devel] creating General Book modules

[Chris Little]

On Tue, 5 Nov 2002, Patrick Narkinsky wrote:

> I was actually about this problem, a little bit last night.  It seems to me
> that would be needed would be multiple, ordered indexes of the books.  So,
> you would have the "book" index, which would contain multiple "chapters"
> indexes, then the "verses" indexes.  They could then point inside whatever
> data structure you chose to hold the actual data.  So, you could increment
> by verse, chapter, or book and get sensible results.

Once upon a time (long before I joined), this was how sword worked.
 
> I suppose this could probably be munged into an SWKey (and maybe even
> SWVersekey) derived class.  The downside is that, from what little I
> understand about sword internals, it would require extensions to the file
> format, right?

A little bit, but, again, it's returning to an old format.  Essentially we 
would map to files that are at the moment held in static arrays.

This still doesn't deal with mapping between versifications at all.

> I would be willing to put some time in this if its doable (since I am
> specializing in second temple Judaism, the apocrypha are quite important
> documents for me.) 

Regarding doing Apocrypha as general books... I would personally really 
rather that people not do this.

It's a pain to manage.  It's doing things the wrong way because they can't 
yet be done the right way.  It's handling the same thing using multiple 
paradigms.  And it is very unlikely that people would do apocrypha from 
Bibles other than their favorite, making our collection very lopsided.  
And it doesn't help with making Bibles with Apocrypha (once that's 
possible) any easier since we already have all the data for them.

--Chris