[sword-devel] Shorter book name abbreviations

[Greg Hellings]

I was suggesting that in your application's settings you could provide
a "customize book abbreviations" mechanism to the user, so they
wouldn't have to locate the files and manually edit them.

I don't see a problem with the 2 letter ones, as long as they are
clearly obvious as to what they are.  Philippians and Philemon, for
example, I don't think ought to be given default 2 letter
abbreviations.  While "Ph" usually means Philippians and "Phil" means
Philemon, usually don't remember Philippian's existence when I'm
quickly abbreviating Philemon as "Ph".

Thus, if you allow the user to edit the abbreviations through the
application, then they can select "P" to mean Philemon if they use
that book frequently or "N" to be Nehemiah.  It could also solve this
user's problem directly by allowing him to provide his own set of
2-character abbreviations.

--Greg

On Sun, Sep 19, 2010 at 9:27 AM, Jonathan Morgan <jonmmorgan at gmail.com> wrote:
> They are plain text files, so it is certainly possible to edit them.
> However, anything that is editable will probably not be edited by very many
> people, so I think it is important to get the defaults "right".  The
> questions are more "Does anyone think that these kind of two character
> abbreviations make sense to be included by default?" and "Can anyone see any
> major problems with using these kind of two character abbreviations?"
>
> BTW, the standard English locale seems to already have some one letter
> abbreviations, such as "N" for "Numbers" and "P" for "Psalms".
>
> Jon
>
> On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 12:22 AM, Greg Hellings <greg.hellings at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Book abbreviations are part of the translations of SWORD, are they
>> not?  If they are, it should be relatively easy to allow users to edit
>> and add them to their heart's content by providing a programmatic
>> method to allow them to edit the localization files.  That would allow
>> the user to set their own two or even one character abbreviations if
>> they wanted.
>>
>> Of course, I could be wildly mistaken in that.
>>
>> --Greg
>>
>> On Sun, Sep 19, 2010 at 9:05 AM, Jonathan Morgan <jonmmorgan at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > Hi all,
>> >
>> > We have received a request that all books have 2 letter abbreviations,
>> > like
>> > Luke does (Lk).  Full text below:
>> >
>> > "Sometimes I do a lot of searches, and it would also be faster if the
>> > abbreviations for books were reduced to 2 consonants, like rv for
>> > Revelation
>> > or rm for Romans, rather than rom. Most are only two, like like for
>> > Luke,
>> > but for some reason others are not."
>> >
>> > I can't think off hand of any problems with this other than the
>> > increased
>> > potential for collisions and multiple abbreviations being used for the
>> > same
>> > book name.  What do others think.  Is this a good idea or a bad idea?
>> >
>> > Jon
>> >
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