[sword-devel] An Introduction/Questions

[DM Smith]

Welcome Doug!

Doug Rintoul wrote:
> 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.
>   

Hopefully, it will run on the Mac as well. That is a variant of Unix.

> 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.
>   
Personally, I use google, putting sword-devel as the first word in the 
search.
This list is public and various sites index it. You might find one of 
them easier.
For example:
http://www.opensubscriber.com/messages/sword-devel@crosswire.org/topic.html

> 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.
>   

I'll leave this one to one of the other developers.

> Thanks for listening.
>
> Doug Rintoul
> SIL
>