[sword-devel] Other religions?

[Chris Little]

Lee,

I'll try to answer your questions about whether Sword would need any 
modification to suit your needs.

On Sat, 10 Apr 2004, Lee Braiden wrote:

> Well, I was thinking (initially) of Buddhism, which has many individual
> texts, and would require a much more hierarchical classification system
> to begin with.

If you have many individual texts you have essentially two options:
If they form a set canon, you can group them as a single text.  Otherwise 
(or if you don't want to group them), just create multiple modules.

I don't know what more vs. less hierarchical means with respect to texts.  
But assuming you refer to many levels of hierarchy, I'm sure Sword would 
have no difficulty.  I don't know that there's any limit on the number of 
levels a GenBook can take, but if Troy hard coded any limits it's probably 
quite high.  Speaking from experience, I've imported the Catechism of the 
Catholic Church into Sword without difficulty, and it has somewhere around 
nine levels of hierarchy.

> Canons with thousands of individual texts, ancient and modern
> commentaries and poetry, practical guidelines and fundamental theories,
> separate modern works, etc.  And that's only one of many lineages.  Add
> in translations, cross-referencing with similar traditions, etc., and
> SWORD in its standard form would be a little complex to navigate :)

In other words you need to link between documents.  These are frontend
issues.  It's not that they shouldn't be handled, but they are in the
domain of the frontends.
 
> Also, I'm not sure if it is currently multi-lingual enough for languages like 
> Chinese, Pali, etc.  Could be wrong on that, though.

It is.  Sword is very i18n'ed.


--Chris