[sword-devel] Encoding of mods.d/ conf files?

[Chris Little]

DM Smith wrote:
> On Aug 19, 2006, at 9:22 AM, Eeli Kaikkonen wrote:
> 
>> Is the encoding of the module .conf files in mods.d/ ISO8859-1? It's
>> stated nowhere, at least in the module making guide or in wiki. It  
>> seems
>> that some modules have have book descriptions in encoding which is
>> compatible with 8859-1.
> 
> 
> The conf is to be UTF-8 if the conf sets the encoding to UTF-8.
> It is to be cp1252 otherwise, which is a superset of ISO8859-1.

Personally, I agree with Eeli that we should be moving to UTF-8 
entirely. Permitting continued use of CP1252 is a good transition step, 
of course.

>> This should be standardized. The best thing would be to move to  
>> utf8 and
>> have two description fields, one for English/ASCII and one for native
>> language/utf8. 8859-1 discriminates against users of other encodings.
>>
>> Another thing which is wrong in .conf files is allowing the use of rtf
>> in 'about' section. Sword website and BibleTime both show only raw  
>> code
>> e.g. in chincvt module's about section. Even that module uses only  
>> \par
>> tag, the rest could be encoded in utf8. Complex formatting should  
>> not be
>> necessary in about text. There's no use to allow rtf if frontends  
>> don't
>> bother implementing it.
> 
> It was stated in an earlier thread by Chris Little, that RTF codes  
> for characters outside of ASCII should not be used.

I think there might be some Chinese modules where we use RTF to encode 
the About text, but I'm not sure of the reasons for that.

Again personally, I would really like to dump the whole .conf file 
format and adopt a simple XML schema for .conf information. We might 
even be able to just adopt the OSIS header as our .conf format (with 
some additions or specialized (sub-)typing). Maybe for 1.5.9++.

--Chris