[sword-devel] Calvin's Commentaries and empty footnotes

[Luke Plant]

On Wednesday 09 January 2008 20:30:15 DM Smith wrote:

> > I notice something like this in KJV: <note type="study">Adam: or,
> > the man</note>
> >
> > In the new Calvin, there seems to be something like: <note n="40">
> > <p> Namely, into heaven and earth.</p> 	 </note>
>
> This is perfectly valid OSIS.
>
> Just a wild guess that the <p>...</p> is causing the note to be
> rendered as empty.
>
> IMHO, having the entire note surrounded by <p> is unnecessary and
> probably will introduce unwanted whitespace.

The problem with stripping it is that sometimes notes in Calvin's 
commentaries can be several paragraphs long, I believe.  Stripping out 
any markup inside a note should be a last resort, IMO.  If the frontend 
wants to do that, there is nothing stopping them, but requiring it of 
the module source doesn't seem to make sense.

> > In KJV, we don't seem to have a number, just a 'type'.
>
> The KJV preserved the type attribute from the previous edition. There
> were no "n" attributes, so none were created.
>
> >   The 'raw' output
> > shows the 'type' as 'type=n'
>
> Actually, this is a "magic" value created by the Sword engine. It is
> set to 'x' if it the type is a cross-reference and 'n' otherwise.
>
> >  - it's obviously using the 'n' that goes
> > with the note number.
>
> BTW, in OSIS (and I think that it got it from TEI), the n attribute
> is used for the "number" to be shown. It could be something other
> than digits. Sword does not look at the value, but manufactures it's
> own. JSword uses it if present, creating it's own when not.

In the Calvin module, the values of 'n' are straight from the ThML 
sources, and ThML also borrows its definition of <note> from TEI.  My 
thml2osis.xslt code does no translation of the <note> tag -- it just 
uses all the existing attributes.  Once there is concensus about how 
this should work I'll update the module.  In BibleTime, which is the 
only frontend I have installed at the moment (apart from my own 
Kio-Sword, which doesn't handle notes at all), notes are rather 
tricky -- it is next to impossible to get the contents to show up at 
all, you have to mess around selecting the text (can anyone tell me 
what I'm doing wrong?).

It would be great to have docs for this kind of thing.  My biggest 
frustration with the Sword project is finding documentation -- I can't 
even find generated API docs for Sword, the only ones I have I 
generated myself (I think) using doxygen several years ago.  Searching 
through source code to find answers to these questions is very far from 
ideal (and impossible if you don't read C++/Java/whatever), as is 
trying to search mailing list archives which are usually out of date.

Best regards, and thanks for help debugging the module,

Luke

-- 
"The first ten million years were the worst. And the second ten 
million, they were the worst too. The third ten million, I didn't enjoy 
at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline." (Marvin the 
paranoid android)

Luke Plant || http://lukeplant.me.uk/