[sword-devel] Bibles without paragraphing

[DM Smith]

On Nov 6, 2009, at 10:05 PM, Chris Little wrote:

> We have many many Bibles that lack any kind of paragraphing markup.  
> These will tend to be rendered as a single big block of text per  
> chapter, which is rather ugly.
>
> Some front ends offer a verse-per-line option where every verse gets  
> its  own newline, regardless of whether the Bible has paragraphing.  
> I think this is a good option for the case of non-paragraphed Bibles  
> but undesirable for those that do have paragraph indication.
>
> I would like to propose that we add a new Feature to .confs (e.g.  
> Feature=Paragraphs). If the feature is absent, a front end can know  
> that it should output newlines at the end of each verse.
>
> Alternately, we could tag unparagraphed Bibles with  
> Feature=NoParagraphs. There will be many more Bibles that need to be  
> checked, updated, and re-downloaded by users. But if a user fails to  
> update his content, in this case there wouldn't be the incorrect  
> behavior of rendering paragraphed Bibles as verse-per-line.
>
> A third alternative (probably less attractive now that we're  
> releasing quite a few non-KJV v11n Bibles) is to do one of the above  
> and then offer static paragraphing like OLB does. OLB starts new  
> paragraphs at set verses, regardless of the Bible. We could grab the  
> paragraph data from the KJV, for example, and then insert paragraph  
> marks in the render filters.
>
>
> I think my preference is to add Feature=Paragraphs and just do verse- 
> per-line in the absence of that feature. Thoughts?

I like how Xiphos handle the issue in general: It allows a user to set  
persistent personal preferences on each module. My guess is that most  
users only have a few, maybe a dozen modules, that they use with some  
frequency and setting preferences on those is not  a big deal.

There is a bigger need than it merely being a switch as to turning on/ 
off vpl. Having rich whitespace markup sometimes looks very ugly in  
vpl mode. It is not just paragraphs but also line breaks, divs, poetry  
markup and the like. In a VPL mode it might be better to turn off  
those elements.

Maybe, it would be better to have a comma list of these elements?

Having a "companion" which gives v11n appropriate paragraphing is a  
good idea. However, the KJV traditionally has poor paragraphing. For  
example, most of the NT does not have paragraph marks. IIRC, they are  
only in the Gospels. At the beginning of the chapters, there is a  
minor index that probably can be used.

In Him,
	DM