[sword-devel] Module Display Names

[Greg Hellings]

This is just a query/brain dump as an exposition on an issue which I
believe came up on bt-devel (maybe it was here).

The "title" of a work, as displayed by both Xiphos and BibleTime
(still the only two SWORD applications I've used, so forgive me if I
have left out others in my brain dump as I don't know their behaviors)
in their list of works for download or open, is the title, verbatim,
as it appears within the brackets on the first line of a module's
.conf file.  As we know from the other thread, this title is very
limited.  To quote the wiki page on conf files, "It can only contain
A-Z, a-z, 0-9 and _."

Now this is a very strict limitation and, to me, rather limits the
usefulness of the title to internal representations within an
application or engine.  For some modules, there is a natural choice
for this field which is relatively unambiguous: ESV, KJV, YLT, NASB,
Webster.  For others, there might be a slightly more abiguous choice:
does "Luther" mean his commentaries, his collected works or his
German-language translation?

But for my own situation, there are possibly some very ambiguous
titles that I am stuck with.  For instance, I have a few different
works which are commentaries on the same book.  The titles might all
be "The Book of John" and just be by different authors.  In the
current status I am somewhat stuck with calling them things like
"The_Book_of_John_AuthorA" and "The_Book_of_John_AuthorB".  As I said
above, these represent great internal/developer names for these two
works, but they aren't so user friendly.  Is there a better recourse
for me, where I can specify a different conf value?  Something along
the lines of
[INTERNAL_NAME]
DisplayName=Not so restrictive on characterset

This would greatly help me, as we have both names already in place for
the modules I'm working with so we can have manageable conf files
names.  Of course, then I'm violating the [NAME] = name.conf directive
of the conf files.  A real example from the set is
SL_CM_GAL_NIG.conf:
[The Epistle to the Galatians]
Well, I sure don't want the user to need to figure out what
"SL_CM_GAL_NIG" stands for, but according to the official standards
"The Epistle to the Galatians" is not a valid conf file name.  But
currently "The Epistle to the Galatians" is what both BibleTime and
Xiphos display, despite the "invalidity" of the conf file.

Is there a conf file entry akin to "DisplayName" that we already have
and I'm just missing it? Or can we get one, even if it is optional and
defaults to the value of [XYZ] in its absence?

Anyway, that is my brain dump for the afternoon.

--Greg