[sword-devel] Internal and External Keys

DM Smith dmsmith555 at yahoo.com
Fri Jun 20 04:25:34 MST 2008


In testing the beta GenBooks, I saw something I didn't care for and it  
got me thinking.

In the beta GenBook "Imitation" the tree is something like:
Book 1
	Chapter 1
	Chapter 2
	...
Book 4
	...
	Chapter 18

In each of these parts, they start with a declarative heading like:
BOOK FOUR
AN INVITATION TO HOLY COMMUNION
The Voice of Christ

and

The First Chapter
The Great Reverence With Which We Should Receive Christ
The Disciple

What I didn't like was the non-descriptive, relatively meaningless  
keys. From a reader's perspective, I expected a "Table of Contents"  
like I see in any/every book, with descriptive titling of the chapters.

I.E.
Book 1: Thoughts Helpful in the Life of the Soul
	Chapter 1: Imitating Christ and Despising All Vanities on Earth
	Chapter 2: Having a Humble Opinion of Self
....

But, the thought I had was that having keys like Imitation.1.1 (or  
even Imitation.Book_1.Chapter_1) would be useful, but not for viewing.  
Having long keys is not useful for cross-references. Some of the new  
beta modules have rich cross-references.

For dictionaries, such as Strong's, I'd like to see the actual  
headword, perhaps prefixed with the number, in the listing of "words"  
in the dictionary. (With TEI dictionaries, this is relatively straight  
forward to dig out of the text. It is the "first" <orth> element's  
content.)

For daily devotions, I'd rather not see 01.22, but localized "January  
22" (Bible Desktop does this now).

So basically, I'd like for SWORD modules to define an internal key (as  
is done today) and optionally, an external display key. Either of  
which would be useful for searching.

This is something we do today with Bibles. The actual key is an index  
number into the KJV versification. We use transformations to go  
between verse references and this ordinal value.

In Him,
	DM

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