[sword-devel] Transliteration

[Chris Little]

Martin Gruner wrote:

>>So, my thought is to separate the single transliterator option we
>>currently have into script-specific options, e.g. one for Greek, one for
>>Hebrew, one for Gothic, etc.
>>
>>Does that sound good or bad or does anyone have a better idea?
> 
> 
> I'm not sure I understand your proposal correctly. One for every source or 
> target script?

One for every source script.  For example, there will be options for 
Greek texts that allow transliteration to Beta, BGreek, ALA-LC, IPA, 
ISO, etc.

> One for every source script would enable us to only offer the transliterators 
> which support a module's text, but would result in a multitude of 
> transliteration filters.

There are around 20 different scripts that we support currently.  (It 
will actually get more complicated when I start writing 
language-specific transliterators, but that won't be until some time 
next year.)  I think doing a transliterator per script will be 
necessary, but when it is implemented, we can make the API check for 
modules with a given script and only display those that are relevent to 
the user.  (This will be a little complicated too, since we only know 
the language that appears in a module, not the script it uses, and we 
only know the primary language, not languages that may be used in short 
quotations.)

> One for every target scripts would avoid that, as there would only be few 
> filters. Maybe the filters could have a function to ask them which source 
> scripts they support?

One filter per target script would force all source scripts to 
transliterate according to a single standard.  I.e. Greek couldn't be 
displayed as ALA-LC while Hebrew is displayed as SBL.  It also breaks 
down when transliteration to a particular standard does not exist for a 
given script.  E.g. the Hugoye only works for Syriac, so if it's 
selected as the target standard, what should be done with Hebrew?  This 
is essentially how the transliterator filter works currently--and since 
it applies to all scripts, we only need one filter.

--Chris