[sword-devel] The poor man's interlinear

[David Haslam]

Here's a more detailed list of requirements from my friend (who's a volunteer
for MissionAssist).

1. Definitely different encodings. This is where ALL comparison programs
fall down. Most operate on ANSI plain text; better ones are Unicode
compliant; none allows independent setting of fonts for legacy files
vs.Unicode file.

2. There is a nastier snag which will deter those who aspire to writing a
capable program: multi-byte encoding. Two or more legacy glyphs form a
composed character. Its Unicode representation can involve 1 to 4
(occasionally more) glyphs to create the composed character. How on earth do
you then compare legacy with Unicode? Since we are checking how the text
DISPLAYS I have even investigated image matching programs to see whether we
could compare screen shots - the matching tends to be too precise, and fuzzy
matching is not offered.

3. I use <Compare It!> which is Unicode compliant but only allows one font
per  task. Besides the L&R panes it has another window which stacks line N
in file A above line N in file B which simplifies reading/comparing the text
even if the displays are different. It is good enough to insert virtual
blank lines to keep the display text blocks aligned. The author won't add a
dual font feature - I've asked.

4. What I looking for is a means to inter-linearise two text files, keeping
the text as closely aligned as font differences allow. The text has to be
more than plain text, since the projects always involve customised legacy
proportional fonts.

David



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