[sword-devel] Poetry & prose

[Chris Little]

On Sat, 11 Jan 2003, Rev. Michael Paul Johnson wrote:

> At 10:39 10-01-03 -0700, Chris Little wrote:
> >OSIS handles everything on Michael's list, though some items are not 
> >addressed specifically (such as poetry/prose formatting, which would be 
> >done with style sheets).
> 
> Poetry/prose formatting cannot be done properly just with style sheets.
> To accurately represent a translation like the WEB or NIV that presents
> text in poetry and prose format, you must be able to mark every section
> as poetry or prose. In prose, you must mark paragraphs, and in poetry,
> you also need to be able to distinguish between initial and subsequent
> verses of poetry line sets. In GBF, this is done with <Pp>, <PP>, <CM>,
> and <CL> tags. In XSEM, this is done with <p>, <linegroup>, and <line>
> tags. In SIL SF, this is done with \p, \q, and \q2 tags. I am
> disappointed that so many Bible study software packages simply discard
> this information. The result is ugly poetry that often looks like it has
> many capitalization errors in it.

Okay, OSIS does address "formatting" to this extent, but these aren't 
display formatting, strictly speaking, but marking of text units.  OSIS 
has <p>, <lg>, and <l> tags corresponding to <p>, <linegroup>, and <line> 
from XSEM.  However, <lg>/<l> may be used in marking either poetic lines 
or orthographic lines.

Display formatting details, such as alignment, indentation, spacing 
between lines/paragraphs, etc. would all need to be handled with 
stylesheets using attributes such as type in OSIS.  This includes marking 
different types of lines to define their degree or type of indentation.

--Chris