[sword-devel] Sword support of indents and line breaks

[Chris Little]

On 4/12/2013 11:18 AM, John Austin wrote:
>
>
> On 04/12/2013 07:45 PM, Chris Little wrote:


>>> I've worked with many, many SFM texts, and they often do not follow SFM
>>> rules or play nice in a variety of ways. All of this greatly complicates
>>> an already serious conversion from SFM to Sword. The proof may in the
>>> the pudding. Simple is sometimes better in the real world. Sure, IBT
>>> could recreate their modules using container elements, but that still
>>> would not provide the reliability or control enjoyed by the existing
>>> modules. I still don't see (beyond theory and arguable semantics) a good
>>> reason to deny "customers" a sound and working solution.
>>
>> As a rule, we don't do things incorrectly when we know that they are
>> wrong beforehand. Indent milestones are arbitrary, ad hoc, bad
>> engineering practice, and bad markup practice. Generating  s as
>> pretend paragraph indentation is bad (X)HTML and completely inflexible.
>> (What happens when a content provider wants a half indent? A hanging
>> indent?) The proposal is a big kludge. We should instead implement the
>> correct method of generating indented and other paragraph types.
> They work perfectly well. They validate against the OSIS schema. They
> are good engineering practice because they solve a difficult problem
> without negative effects of any kind. We can argue about bad markup etc.
> but some grace should be given to an approach that is proven and
> perfectly valid, which already exists in practice, and which has solved
> a nagging real life problem.

They don't work perfectly well.

In terms of representation, the milestones represent something that 
isn't there and should instead be a property of something that actually 
is there.

In terms of the formatted output (the (X)HTML), you're emitting 
something extremely bad. You want indentation, which is a formatting 
matter. To achieve your intended formatting you are corrupting the 
character data stream by inserting NBSPs to cause a side effect: 
horizontal spacing. If you want to change horizontal position, you 
should do so through one of the established methods, not as a side 
effect of inserting characters that have different semantics.

Consider this: When you copy & paste text from a front end or webpage, 
should the indentation be copied as a bunch of NBSPs? Hopefully you 
agree it should not. The NBSPs are noise that has been inserted into the 
character stream. (If you try this on the PDF you linked and the 
rendering by phpsword, you can see that they behave differently when you 
copy text and paste it into a word processor or text editor. That's 
because the PDF does formatting correctly using PDF layout methods, but 
phpsword relies on a side effect.)


> Actually, the line I copied above is the whole "paragraph"- it is not a
> multi-line anything. See
> http://ibt.org.ru/en/text.htm?m=UZVL&l=Ruth.1.15&g=0 for the real
> location of this example. These two words are not a paragraph in
> anyone's book, and to call this a paragraph, as you insist that I must
> do to use Sword, is in my book: "arbitrary, ad hoc, bad engineering
> practice, and bad markup practice", and just wrong. Let publishers
> decide what it is and what it will look like- users of Sword will all be
> glad!

Abstractly, it's multi-line. Some (most?) of these paragraphs are 
multi-line. Even your two word example would be multi-line with a 
sufficiently narrow column. These paragraphs break in exactly the same 
way as other paragraphs.

I still can't see the argument for these not being paragraphs. I would 
accept that they could be a different type of paragraph from the type 
that starts at the start of a sentence, but they are clearly paragraphs. 
Paragraphs with hanging indents are markedly more different than these, 
but they're still paragraphs.

--Chris