[sword-devel] Rendering added words for languages that don't use italics?

[Greg Hellings]

Well let's see what we would need done:

1) A universally agreed-upon method of rendering added words for every
language we support modules in and logic to note the module's language and
render accordingly.  This would be a tedious undertaking, although not
particularly complicated to implement. However, it would be flatly the wrong
method of implementation, since added words are not rendered the same in all
English versions (while other languages have their details given elsewhere
in this thread).

2) Or each application would need to provide a mechanism to allow every
module to determine how to render added text. Some modules might use italics
or font colors, which would be easy if we could get every HTML filter around
to always produce the same markup (for example <span class="transAdded">text
here</span>). But there are multiple HTML filters (the engine-supplied ones,
JSword's, BibleTime's and maybe others), some of them not particularly
actively supported, and I'll let you ask Troy about how close we are to
getting every application to agree to use the same type of markup.
 Additionally this method would require applications to allow each module to
supply (at least a limited amount of) CSS to render these. You can see other
discussions I've started to see how well that was received (I'll give you a
hint - it was rejected out of hand by multiple people).

Of course, that provides no help to those modules who might use other
markers (NIV-inspired half brackets, full brackets, I've seen texts that use
an asterisk to mark such words, etc) for added text. In a browser these
might be handled with a snippet of JavaScript, but support for JS is even
more widely varied among SWORD applications than is CSS support (I can't
imagine that JSword can support JS at all, currently Xiphos probably can't.
 And of course, I choose to completely ignore non-HTML front ends as not
being worthy of consideration) and is even less desirable than CSS.


I don't know about other applications, but Xiphos and BibleTime are both
hardly in a position to consider this effort for the time being.  Xiphos'
team is frantically trying to ditch embedded Gecko/Xulrunner and GTKHTML to
move to Webkit as well as suffering from some incompatibilities with GTK3
and Fedora Core 15.  Appearance of added text is hardly on Xiphos' list of
even interesting problems at the moment. And BibleTime has just had its
first commits in an extended period of time - I doubt it has the man hours
right now to tackle any such feature.

--Greg

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 11:02 AM, David Haslam <dfhmch at googlemail.com>wrote:

> This thread seems to have ground to a halt at the end of April, but with no
> positive outcome other than a nice exchange of ideas.
>
> Is there any likelihood that someone with the right programming skills
> might
> take this on?
>
> Even though we might steer translators to adopt USFM (in place of MS Word)
> the opportunity to make use of \add_...\add* will be wasted unless SWORD
> front-ends can display the OSIS equivalent as meaningfully different for
> Arabo-Persian scripts.
>
> cf. At least while they are using MS Word, such added words could be
> "de-highlighted" by means of a grey font colour.
>
> Likewise for many other scripts that don't make use of italics. There can
> still be a display problem for scripts that do have italics capability.
>
> In Cyrillic languages using italics for added words is less attractive, not
> as common, and not so easily spotted compared to Latin scripts. Using a
> grey
> font color might be deemed preferable.
>
> David
>
> --
> View this message in context:
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> Sent from the SWORD Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
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