[sword-devel] An Introduction/Questions

[Doug Rintoul]

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Doug Rintoul and I am with 
Wycliffe/SIL. I have recently joined a team dedicated to bringing a good 
translation environment to Linux. Part of that task is making the 
material in Translators Workplace available under Linux. For those you 
who may not know...Translator's Workplace (TW) is a software package 
containing such resources for translators as Bible versions, 
commentaries, translation resources, and dictionaries and lexicons. It 
was originally developed for Windows-based computer systems using Folio 
Views. We have many in house documents as well as material that we have 
licensed from other publishers.

Over the past couple of weeks I have perusing through the sword-devel 
email list to get me up to speed on the issues of using Sword. This 
brings me to my first question. Is there an easy way to search the list? 
I always like to research an area before I make suggestions/ask 
questions. Being able to search the list would sure make it a lot easier.

Now for my first technical question. Some of our commentaries have book 
and chapter introductions. The Sword API does allow for this by 
specifying chapter and verse 0 as the verse key for book introductions 
and verse 0 as the verse key for chapter introductions. Unfortunately 
there appears to be a limitation as to the amount of material that can 
be retrieved by calls such as GetRawEntry. I believe this is due to the 
choice of unsigned short for various size variables. I was wondering 
what the ramifications would be of changing unsigned short to some other 
more accommodating data type or if there are other ways of getting 
around this limitation? Many of our introductions far exceed the 
theoretical limit of 65536 that unsigned short allows for.

Thanks for listening.

Doug Rintoul
SIL