[sword-devel] Should there be a suitable delimiter before verses appended by osis2mod?

[DM Smith]

Lots of difficulty here. Currently, the SWORD engine leaves it to the front-end to place the the verse number in the fashion that the front-end (user) desires. Basically, for each “verse” the front-end will ask for pre-verse (aka headings) content and then the verse content. It will place the verse number between the two. There are no markers for the verse number in a module and as such, there is no code for handling verse number markers in the text. Key point here is that the SWORD engine does nothing with the verse number and the front-ends do nothing with the heading and verse content.

Having the verse number in plain text is problematic as it may not match the styling applied by the front end. (Some module makers have observed the lack of verse markers in appended verses and have supplied their own verse numbers.)

The other problem with verse markers deals with non-latin scripts. If the front-end is rendering verse numbers in Arabic, these marked verse numbers should also display in Arabic.

The NoParagraphs feature flag is for front-ends to style the individual verse with a new line at the end of verse content.

NoParagraphs also is a problem with appended verses. Since the verse content is not parsed by the front-end it cannot place a new line at the appropriate points.

Please note that NoParagraphs does not mean VersePerLine (VPL). It merely means that the module does not have paragraphs and that a front-end may want to help the user make the text more readable. That may be VPL but doesn’t require it. For example, in a JSword front-end I think it’d make sense to have VPL be the default rendering, but that the user could change it to something else.

Regarding osis2mod, it is quite easy a change to have verse markers. The lack of them is a historical architectural decision. I doubt it will change. There is a debug flag that will insert
milestones to see where the verse begin and end tags were. This is helpful to understand how osis2mod chose to split content into pre-verse and verse content.

I’m not keen on osis2mod adding content or markup (especially presentation markup) to a module. Again NoParagraphs does not mean VPL. While the <lb/> element (equivalent of html’s <br/>) can be used anywhere in an OSIS module, it was intended only to be used within poetry.

In His Service,
	DM

> On Dec 28, 2014, at 10:13 AM, David Haslam <dfhmch at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 
> I agree, and for modules with Feature=NoParagraphs, maybe even also a new
> line before the verse number?
> 
> However, the new line would need to be done by the engine, rather than built
> into the module.
> 
> cf. Module build doesn't know what's in the config file.
> 
> David
> 
> 
> 
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