[sword-devel] Shorter book name abbreviations

[Jonathan Morgan]

On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 12:45 AM, Chris Little <chrislit at crosswire.org>wrote:

>
>
> 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.
>

I was talking about interpretation, not presentation (and so I think was the
user, given they were talking about minimising the amount they have to
type).  I agree that the short name presentation is fine as it is.  Do you
know of any harm caused by adding additional interpretations?

Jon
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