[sword-devel] Comming soon: new improved sword searching

[Chris Little]

On Sun, 8 Sep 2002 porton@narod.ru wrote:

> Very please also make possibility to search in Bible paragraphs instead of 
> Bible verses.
> 
> This is because verses are introduced by people and are just arbitrary, but 
> splitting Bible in paragraphs (at least in the correct manuscripts) is 
> inspired by Holy Spirit! So borders of paragraphs is a very important matter 
> (otherwise God wouldn't split Bible into paragraphs at all to reduce sizes and 
> weights of the rolls).
> 
> Paragraph consists of several verses.

This is somewhat impractical as we do not store paragraph information
except in the text itself if at all.  A great number of our Bibles do not
indicate any kind of paragraph division. Furthermore I've never heard
anyone suggest that paragraph divisions were inspired.  I would certainly
never consider them as such.

It would be nice to allow searches that can return multi-line chunks like 
"Mt 1:1-5" with a user-set variable for the maximal chunk size to return.

 
> P.S. In Sword's different Bible versions splitting Bible into paragraphs
> is different. It is a bug. We need found which splitting of Hebrew/Greek
> original is correct and resplit wrongly splitted versions.

It is not a bug.  This will not change.

We don't go about changing texts because we think they ought to be some
way other than how their authors created them.  Variations in our data
consist of unintentional errors and limitations imposed by the engine at
the time they were created.  What you're suggesting is intentional
tampering with others' work.  Not only do I take offense at this notion
and consider it immoral to pass off a text as something other than what it
is, but I don't think there exists a copyright holder in the world who
would look upon us favorably if he knew we did such things.

The only texts that need to be re-paragraphed are those without any
paragraphing markup whose print editions do include paragraphing and texts
that came out of OLB.  OLB has a fixed paragraphing structure that it
(incorrectly) imposes on ALL texts.  But I don't think we have many texts
from OLB any longer as we've mostly found better sources.

--Chris