[sword-devel] GenBook bibles, av11n

[Greg Hellings]

On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 3:38 PM, John Dudeck <john.dudeck at sim.org> wrote:

> Being somewhat new to the Sword project, and a module developer, not in
> Sword development per se, I don't have any particular interest in GenBook
> bibles. It sound's like a kludgy way to avoid having to make the base
> engine powerful enough to handle flexible versification.
>

It's not a kludge. It's an alternative implementation to the baked-in
version we have now.


>
> I have been a Logos content developer for several years, and what they
> call Bible Data Types that are defined in Verse Maps are hard-coded into
> the Logos engine. This has always been a source of consternation for me. At
> least Logos has been willing to add verse maps for new bibles without
> complaining. But it is a several-month process from the time the map is
> submitted until it becomes active by a new release of Logos and the Logos
> Book Design Tools. I gather that the Sword project is similar, except that
> it doesn't really have verse-by-verse maps that show how every given verse
> in one bible version maps to the equivalent verse in every other version.
> Being limited to the current twenty v11n's, for which several French bibles
> do not match any of them, is problematic, and requires some kind of
> work-around to get bibles and commentaries to work in a usable way.
>

Yes, the SWORD engine currently works the same way. You have to propose a
new versification, it needs to get approved by the developers and then
added to the system. There is a way to define mappings between
versifications, but it's not an absolute necessity to add it.


>
> It seems to me that it should be possible to devise a pluggable v11n
> system where the verse mapping is embedded in the module. Or at least where
> verse mapping is loaded from a file at run time, and does not need to be
> hard-coded and compiled into the engine. I gather that this also the dream
> of the Sword development team.
>

This is exactly what GBBs would be. The versification would be encoded into
the module and loaded at the time it gets opened. It's not kludgy, it's
just the most available solution to the current ask. However, it was never
completed because the engine chose to go the route of baked-in v11ns for a
number of different reasons. The GBB implementation is significantly more
complicated than just hard-coding versifications, and it is more process
intensive (while baking them in is more memory intensive but faster on
manipulation). These, and other reasons, led to the current av11n system
being implemented instead.

--Greg
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