[sword-devel] Adding abbreviated names to the module conf file (was Re: isalnum(3) for i18n)

[Jonathan Morgan]

On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 4:50 AM, Ben Morgan <benpmorgan at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd really like to see an abbreviations field - while a description is
> useful, an abbreviation such as KJV, ESV, etc is invaluable when there is
> not much room.
> Most bibles have such an abbreviation.
> I also agree that we should be targeting most of this at the end users of
> each module - developers don't matter nearly as much :)
>
> So I think:
> Description should be in the foreign language (encoded as per encoding
> directive)
> There should be a field Abbreviation for a short version (encoded as per
> encoding directive)
> And the actual module name (presumably derived from the abbreviation, but
> ascii) can be used by developers.
>
> Maybe a field like Description_en would be a good idea. Then if you are
> using the english locale, you might see that in the frontend.
> That way you could also have a Description_fr for french description,
> Description_de for german description, etc.

Just reviving this thread, I think at a minimum we need to add an
optional "Abbreviation" field to the module configuration to contain
an abbreviated form of the module name, to be used where frontends
currently use the module name (due to limited space).  For modules
which do not have it, this would fall back to the module name.  For
modules like ESV, ISBE, KJV, ... the module name is perfectly
acceptable, but for something like GerLut1545 a better abbreviation
would probably be Luther 1545 or similar (and this is a problem for
almost all foreign language modules, and I don't want them to be
essentially second class citizens).

I'm not going to argue at present about whether this should be
localised or not, but I suspect it would be better if it were, so long
as all frontends could display the localised text (e.g. AraSVD goes to
some brief Arabic name).

Jon