[sword-devel] Ubuntu Touch Bible app

[Nic Carter]

heya :)

On 05/07/2013, at 7:27 AM, "Troy A. Griffitts" <scribe at crosswire.org> wrote:

>> 2) An improved CLucene search has long been something that BibleTime touts - the index covers more fields and metadata than Sword's CLucene index.
> 
> Yes, I've seen the ability to search on 'footnotes' and 'headings', but didn't feel those were worth adding right now, but tried to convince the BT developers to help me modularize the search framework to allow a 'search field' plugin mechanism-- probably simply a new filter type, and set of filters which could pull the desired field data from the buffer, then they could add plugins for their footnotes and headings and anything else they wanted and frontend could choose which fields they wanted to include when building indexes.  There was no success in that, but they simply wanted to re-write basically the exact same code we have for building CLucene indexes, but including their additional fields.

As a developer who would love to see more stuff in the CLucene search stuff, anything and everything that is pushed into the engine along these lines would be appreciated. In fact, for PS, I have created a pseudo version number but my hack is something I'd be happy to get rid of in order to have proper versioning :)

>> You've also given the impression that the CLucene indexes are not a high priority for you since you have the brute force search available.
> 
> I use the CLucene indexes all the time.  They are great for some things.  I have tried to convince people that they aren't necessary for 90% of searches because our unindexed search of an entire Bible is optimized to return results in under a few seconds on most hardware (probably including most mobile handsets these days).

I haven't tried lately on older hardware, primarily because I have recently dropped support for anything older than the iPhone 3GS (Apple dropped support about a year ago and I finally realised I didn't have enough time to try to keep support for older devices through hack methods that needed more hackery each update of Xcode, so now I spend my time on more productive things!).
Quick side-question: does either the BT or unindexed searches get around the issue of vowels in Arabic and spaces (or lack there-of?) in Asian languages? That would be handy, as I still haven't fixed those issues in PS......

>> 3) An entirely rewritten set of OSIS filters, at the very least. Whether these are better or not, I have no opinion of, although I have found BibleTime's filters more understandable.
> 
> Yes, but re-written isn't necessarily a feature.  We add support for new things all the time in our filters.  Are the Bibletime filters updated as well?  Again, this is important to me: I would love for all the projects which render to HTML to agree on what they would like to see as the HTML output from the filters and work together on the new XHTML filter set in the engine so we can all share in each other's improvements.

I'd love to have access to those filters that allow multiple translations in the same WebView window. That could be handy as a nice way of quickly implementing "split-screen", which I haven't had time to do much about.

Also, are you (Troy) interested in removing more display html elements from the HTML filters and replace them with more CSS classes?

<start rant>
For example, for footnotes in osisxhtml we are displaying the footnote character (generally a 'N' but now configurable I believe?) inside THREE different HTML elements.
- First is the <a> element
- Second is the <small> element
- Third is the <sup> element, which has a class attached to it.
I have hacked my version to simply have the <a> element with a class attached to it. The CSS class then defines whether or not to make the text "small" or "sup", cleaning up the code and allowing more flexibility for the front-end (PS, in my case).
It was argued years ago that we couldn't do much with CSS cause some front-ends didn't support CSS, but now-a-days this argument should be laughed at and dismissed. ;)
</end rant>

From my perspective, it sounds like there are some things that would be cool to have in the engine, and with all front-ends there are bits that belong in the front-end code. :)

Thanks, ybic
	nic...  :)
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