[sword-devel] Shorter book name abbreviations

[Chris Little]

On 9/19/2010 7:27 AM, Jonathan Morgan 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?"

No

> and "Can
> anyone see any major problems with using these kind of two character
> abbreviations?"

There would certainly be more collisions, and as far as I can see, 
there's no benefit. In order to cram everything into 2 characters, you 
have to start making trade-offs and teaching people what particular 
abbreviations mean, because there's no way on earth that they will 
correctly guess what you mean in every case.

How do you collapse 1/2 Corinthians/Chronicles into 2 characters? 1/2 
Thessalonians/Timothy?

Or, going the other direction, to which book do "Jo", "Ju", "Ha", "Ze", 
or "Ma" refer? Sword will map those to books if you supply them (and 
will get it right approximately 50% of the time), but Sword shouldn't be 
presenting those types of abbreviations to users.

If a particular user needs particular abbreviations, tell him where to 
find the locale .conf.

> BTW, the standard English locale seems to already have some one letter
> abbreviations, such as "N" for "Numbers" and "P" for "Psalms".

Don't confuse interpretation with generation. Sword will interpret "n" 
as Numbers and "p" as Psalms, but it would never generate those for 
presentation to a user. If we didn't have single-letter values in that 
array, doing a lookup on "n" would return the previous book in the 
array, which is Matthew.

--Chris