[sword-devel] Bibles without paragraphing

[David Haslam]

Some thoughts arising, relating to what is essentially a good idea.

Prior to the publishing of the first Cambridge Paragraph Bible (based on the
KJV), was it not the case that all printed editions of the KJV were
published in what we now call VPL format, but with a pilcrow (¶) included in
the text to mark the start of each paragraph?

If the front-end user can toggle a view between VPL and paragraph (aka
block) modes, should the pilcrows be shown while the application window is
in VPL mode, and hidden when the window is in paragraph mode?

Apart for the KJV, which other historic Bibles used pilcrows in their
printed editions?

cf. The On-Line Bible (OLB) software uses pilcrows as paragraph markers, but
as Chris observes they are imposed on many translations that never had them
in the printed editions. So if we are intent on being faithful to the
original text, perhaps we should be very careful in this regard.

cf. DM Smith regards pilcrows as part of the KJV text (as he makes clear in
the KJV2006 project).

cf. Also my earlier posts on pilcrows in this mailing list.


David

Chris Little-2 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?
> 
> --Chris
> 
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