[sword-devel] proposed patch: adding n=X marker content to footnotes and xrefs

[Karl Kleinpaste]

"scribe777 at gmail.com" <scribe at crosswire.org> writes:
> My thought on this is similar to strongs. Don't show the numbers. They
> are left overs from the era of print-only.

I disagree about that.  Footnote/xref markers are obligatory in a very
large variety of publications, regardless of print or electronic form,
exactly because of the point Brian made: Reference markers are the
common language by which to identify their content.  If someone writes
commentary on a document to argue against the observation made in
footnote #37, then everyone in the world reading the same document knows
exactly what he's talking about.  We don't expect people to count
anonymous markers until they find #37, nor do we expect the commentary
author to identify "the footnote preceding 'word' in verse X."

In any event, not displaying those markers represents a loss to the user
of the author's or publisher's information.

> The exception use case is possibly our NET module which has a
> commentary accompaniment module which might refer to footnotes by
> label.  If I remember correctly.

NETnotes contains numbered footnote content, and NETtextfree is the
version of NET whose footnotes refer only to the numbered footnotes.
(And my own spins of NET are similar though hugely enhanced.)

Greg Hellings <greg.hellings at gmail.com> writes:
> SWModule::RenderText(bool includeNumbers=false)
> Would that do the trick?

"scribe777 at gmail.com" <scribe at crosswire.org> writes:
> Greg's idea for a flag is a good alternative to the span. I believe we
> have some other class statics in the filters for configuration. We
> could add the flag there. Thoughts?

This would suit me fine.

Ben Morgan <benpmorgan at gmail.com> writes:
> Personally, I've never liked the *x/*n style and I think that in
> particular *xA/*xB looks very ugly.
> BPBible just outputs the letter/number, but colour-codes the
> note/cross-reference to distinguish between the two. This in my
> opinion gives a much cleaner look.

The display of *n/*x is from considerably farther back in time than when
I got involved with Sword, 6 years ago.  When I added n=X post-process,
I simply appended X to what was already there.  I'm open to other ideas,
neutral about the exact form that it takes.

With one exception, that is: Color-coding becomes a progressively harder
problem because we already offer a lot of color configuration and usage
in Xiphos.  We have basic fg/bg (b/w), high-contrast highlight fg/bg
(navy blue/yellow), verse# (light blue), link (default grey; I use
orange), and current verse colors (green).  Then there is Red Words, and
finally Xiphos complicates it all by providing color pair inversion as
an option for normal text (to get "night mode" easily) and highlight.
By this time, finding another sufficiently distinct color from all the
other stuff happening becomes difficult.  The search for colors that
look good enough in both black-on-white and white-on-black is hard, and
we've recently tweaked some of our default colors expressly to deal
better with visibility in both cases.