[sword-devel] Titles/preverse mess rant

[Chris Little]

+1

I spent a couple hours last night trying to determine a decent 
combination of tools that would let OSIS titles display in current 
releases of Xiphos & BibleTime. ("Current", for my purposes, is whatever 
is in the Ubuntu Precise stable repository.)

title_cleanup.pl + osis2mod from 1.6.2 (r2562) + mod2zmod worked well 
for me, I believe. Obviously, it's a bit ridiculous that 
title_cleanup.pl is even needed and that the current SVN trunk utils are 
broken, but this is my current workaround toolchain.

--Chris

On 06/22/2012 01:38 AM, Peter von Kaehne wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I know that it never comes in good to moan publicly.
>
> But the latest thread, started by Karl is yet again another aspect of
> the total mess the preverse setup is.
>
> And it covers a multitude of angles and probably several programmes.
>
> And it has been highlighted again and again by various module makers,
> reaching back several years, with very little progress, in fact, I would
> think with very obvious new regressions.
>
> As a module maker this is hugely embarrassing for me. And I have no way
> of fixing it as I am not even clear what all is involved.
>
> What I can say is that there is essentially very little reliable and
> predictable output coming out of any number of ways to encode
> pre/interverse content.
>
> So as a result, we can see titles moving a verse higher than they should
> be - either (and that is bad) being appended to end of the last verse or
> (and that is unbelievably worse) being prepended to the last verse!!
>
> Further, we can see titles appearing doubled up (see Karl's recent
> thread) and we can see titles appearing/vanishing in unpredictable
> fashion to the title filter.
>
> What I do know is that
>
> a) modules compiled with older versions of osis2mod generally fare better.
> b) some of the output of usfm2osis.pl is not helpful (interleaving of
> verse sID (new verse) and verse eID (last verse) tags)
> c) even old modules suffer from title duplication (see Karl's thread)
> d) the filter system is not completely error free
> e) not all frontends deal with preverse filter output in the same sane way
>
> Now a lot of this is known, well known, regurgitated and remasticated
> for several years now. I am quite sure it would require not a huge
> amount of actual individual programming effort to get right. But it
> would require a joint effort and a joint willingness to see this as a
> shared problem instead of the repeated passing the buck stuff I got fed
> up seeing here.
>
> As I say, as a reasonably prolific module maker with some limited
> programming skills it is way out of my ability to solve by myself.
> Believe me, I have tried. I have learned some XML skills and I have
> added and subtracted attributes, shunted tags about and what not else.
> But that is not really all of it as there is essentially no clearcut and
> definable input which will produce a correct output.
>
> We do need to solve it. We are messing the people who rely on us (Bible
> publishers, specifically) endlessly about and we can do so only for so long.
>
> Right now I am holding back on 4 texts which I can not fix properly
> (Turkish, Azeri, Fijian and Pohnpeian). The former two are for people
> groups counting to several dozens of millions and having electronic
> bibles available makes a huge difference.
>
> So, please, take this seriously.
>
> Peter
>
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