[sword-devel] Bibles without paragraphing

[Jonathan Morgan]

On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 2:05 PM, Chris Little <chrislit at crosswire.org> 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 have no problems with this, so long as the decision of whether to use VPL
or not is left to the frontend and ultimately the user to control rather
than being done automatically by the library.  As you say, I think VPL tends
to be a frontend thing rather than a library thing anyway.

It would be preferable not to bump all version numbers and make all modules
be re-downloaded (in frontends that support module updating) just for
changes which will not make any difference to current frontends anyway.

Just out of curiosity, do you have any guesses as to what percentage of
Bibles do have paragraphs?

Jon
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