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

[John Austin]

On 04/13/2013 03:06 PM, Chris Little wrote:
> 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.

No, the publisher does not believe they are paragraphs. You can talk to 
the translator herself (or himself) and they will have no clue about the 
markup.

>
> 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.

Any type of paragraph is still a type of paragraph. Any paragraph could 
someday become subject to somebody's "paragraph" rules. I'm arguing that 
Sword should offer something that will always be a basic milestone 
indent, and can never be subject to anybody else's interpretation of 
what a paragraph is. The most obvious way to do this would be to call it 
an indent, and not a 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.

I do care very much about the integrity of the source document. I just 
believe that some documents have more integrity using OSIS milestone 
indents than if they had to exclusively use any type of paragraph.

>
> --Chris
>
>
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