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

[Chris Little]

On 4/12/2013 9:42 PM, John Austin wrote:
> I still can't see the argument for requiring that everyone call these
> questionable instances paragraphs, and require that they must always be
> marked up as such. Why not give the publisher the option of calling it a
> paragraph if they consider it a paragraph, or else calling it an indent
> if they think it will be more correctly understood as an indent? For
> instance, many people consider that a paragraph should be followed by a
> blank line (between paragraphs). What if I desire that this indented
> line in my translation should never have a blank line after it, and that
> it is an actual indent which is the content I intend to add- in order to
> make my text more understandable? Then I should be able to call it an
> indent. I would be very correct in doing so. Future readers of my OSIS
> file would also unambiguously understand my intentions as well.

The USFM from the publisher encodes them as paragraphs, so apparently 
the publisher believes they're paragraphs.

They appear and are treated in every sense as if they are paragraphs.

You can continue to invent hypothetical circumstances in which you 
differentiate these from other paragraphs, but that continues to simply 
underline the fact that they are a different _type_ of paragraph.

If you want to call them indents, I suppose you can. If you want to call 
them unicorns, you could do that as well. But for the purposes of 
encoding, you need to use one of the available structures and not 
continue trying to muck up our code with hacks to handle bad and 
unreasoned encoding practice.

Markup for poetry, including line indentation levels, has been part of 
OSIS since 1.0. So the fact that you initially recommended using your 
indentation milestones to layout poetry further demonstrates that you're 
interested in generating presentational side effects and don't 
particularly care about the complications and poor encoding practice 
introduced by doing so or about maintaining the integrity of the source 
document's encoding.

--Chris