[sword-devel] Alternate Versification

[DM Smith]

I've been looking at the code regarding Alternate Versification (aka 
av11n and v11n; I've seen these abbreviations by Troy, Chris and others).

It looks solid. The purpose of this note is to give it a big thumbs up.

Basically here is what I see: (Chris, Troy, correct me where I am off 
base! Please!)
Today (1.5.11 and earlier) speed is a major consideration and canon.h 
provides for that. The core functionality of looking up a verse or intro 
is to convert a verse key into an offset in the module's index. Without 
going into it in great detail, the module, testament, book and chapter 
introductions are addressable in the index, as well as each verse.

In 1.5.12, canon.h no longer includes a fast lookup for this. Instead it 
includes the KJV versification: books by name, number of chapters and 
number of verses per chapter. The new VerseMgr takes this and 
dynamically builds the old lookup table, hiding it behind it's API. The 
performance hit is taken once each time the program is run for each 
versification scheme that is requested.

Chris has taken the CCEL versifications and wrote a perl program that 
uses them as input to generate the same structure for each versification.

Currently, the VerseMgr does not know about the different V11Ns. It 
looks like that is all that is left for it.

If I am understanding this correctly, this leads me to believe that 
GenBooks are not going to be used, but rather regular Bible modules. If 
this is true, it is a boon to commentaries as well, as commentaries are 
structured internally as Bibles. And it gives us compressed modules. And 
it gives us the speed of the Bible module (GenBook is very slow in 
comparison.)

I had been concerned with GenBooks being used as osis2mod does 
transformations and the gen book importer did not.

I think that what is needed is a minor change to osis2mod:
It will need to instantiate an appropriate VerseMgr (based on a new flag 
to the program, defaulting to KJV) and the isKJVRef and makeKJVref will 
need to change to isV11NRef and makeV11NRef.

Whoo Hoo!!!!

BTW, it should be easy to implement this in JSword!

In Him,
    DM