[sword-devel] BPBible 0.3

[DM Smith]

On Jun 7, 2008, at 4:03 AM, Chris Little wrote:

>
>
> DM Smith wrote:
>> On Jun 6, 2008, at 7:13 PM, Ben Morgan wrote:
>>>
>>> Just a question - do you think that the GUI controls, such as text
>>> boxes and lists and what not (everything but the actual text of the
>>> module), should be able to have a different font from the actual
>>> text? Currently under Windows at least, they would have a different
>>> font - arial I think is the default for the html, while it uses the
>>> default windows font for the GUI controls (probably verdana or
>>> something).
>>
>> As Peter and I worked on translating BibleDesktop into Farsi we
>> discovered many things about fonts and internationalization. The core
>> lesson is:
>>
>> Fonts should be able to be tied to a language for the text that is
>> being displayed. While it may be nice to have fonts set per module,  
>> it
>> is not necessary. When a text consists of multiple languages, each
>> piece should be clearly marked (as with xml's xml:lang attribute).
>>
>> (Actually, it really should be set at the level of "script" but I
>> don't know of any formalization of scripts that we could use. (Such  
>> as
>> ISO-639 for languages). I'm not sure that even if such a notion
>> existed whether we could make it understandable to users.)
>
> ISO 15924 (or even BCP 47) as Jonathan suggests is the standard you're
> looking for. OSIS allows both xml:lang and script, with the
> understanding that the latter contain an ISO 15924 code. The  
> definition
> of xml:lang has changed a little since we wrote OSIS, so script is
> basically unnecessary now. xml:lang holds a BCP 47 tag, which can
> contain language, script, & locale subtags.
>
> See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCP_47 or just google BCP 46 or its  
> two
> RFCs: 4646 and 4647.
>
> In assigning fonts throughout a text that isn't nicely tagged with
> script attributes, ICU can help you by identifying the script to which
> each character belongs (according to its ISO 15924 designation). I  
> don't
> know whether Java itself provides anything similar.

Thanks Chris! I always learn new things from you.

Java has ICU4J. So I imagine it is in there. Auto-detection is fine,  
but I would think that it is expensive to do in the engine when  
rendering text. It seems that it would be best to have properly tagged  
xml. Using auto-detection to help with re-tagging would be better, IMHO.

I have some questions:
1) Would it be of any value to SWORD to do something with this?
I am imagining a conf change Script=, where the content would be a  
comma separated list of scripts, with the most dominant being first.  
E.g. A Strong's Greek and Hebrew dictionary with actual Greek and  
Hebrew would have:
Script=Latin,Grek,Hebr

2) How would a SWORD application use script to allow the user to  
assign a font to the script?
This is a usability question of how a user would know which script  
goes with which language with which font?
In looking at the list, it was not obvious that English, French,  
Norwegian, .... use Latin.


In His Service,
	DM