[sword-devel] New Accented Greek NT with Morph

[Chris Little]

DM Smith wrote:
> Martin Gruner wrote:
> 
>>>     If you have a chance, could you please spend some time trying this
>>> link with your browser and report your results and configuration AND
>>> ANYTHING YOU DO (with fonts or otherwise) that improves your viewing of
>>> the accented Bibles.
>>>   
>>
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I tried this in Kate (based on QT 3, as Konqueror) and OpenOffice 
>> (based on libfreetype2). Both give similar results: Precomposed is 
>> perfect, decomposed displays ok (no boxes), but some accents are not 
>> visible or moved (such as the iota subscriptum, which is no real accent).
>>
>> So I’d suggest to stay with the recommendation to use precomposed, and 
>> perhaps offer a filter to decompose (ICU) for people needing it, that 
>> could also be activated on the website.
>>
>> Most important is using the right font. My recommendations: Gentium is 
>> good, but FreeFont (FreeSerif) is best.
>>
> I agree that Gentium is good if only Greek is being shown. If notes are 
> added to the module (e.g. for the variants) then Gentium is not a good 
> choice for displaying the notes. We cannot simply use a different font 
> for notes because some notes may contain more than one language, e.g. 
> English with Greek.

What's wrong with Gentium? I think it has a very attractive set of Latin 
glyphs. There's also Galatia SIL (which has full Greek support and an 
attractive, Times-style Latin range).

> I'm not sure if OSIS has a mechanism to mark the "lang" for elements and 
> whether the language of individual words/phrases can be marked, without 
> changing the flow (i.e. need a span like element such as w). If we had 
> this then it would be possible to use fonts on a per language basis in a 
> module.

Almost all elements permit xml:lang. There is also <foreign>, intended 
for short strings of foreign language text (relative to the rest of the 
text).

Perhaps more appropriate would be the script attribute (which has the 
same distribution as xml:lang). Valid script codes come from ISO 15924 
(see http://www.unicode.org/iso15924/iso15924-codes.html).

Something we could do is mark each change in script with a tag like 
<milestone type="x-scriptChange" script="Latn"/>. We can even 
(potentially) do something like this at runtime since ICU has script 
detection.

> On a related note, in WLC the module is rtl but the notes should be ltr, 
> since they are in English. However, the notes do not indicate their 
> directionality. I don't think it is fair to assume that all notes will 
> be in English. They could have been in Hebrew.

Directionality is something that DEFINITELY should be handled in the 
renderer. It is a property of each codepoint that needs to be handled 
correctly by any reasonable renderer. As such, no attempt to mark 
directionality should be made (and I don't think any facility has been 
provided in OSIS to do so).

We do still mark LtR/RtL in module .conf files, but only for the purpose 
of signaling to the front-end that it needs to render verse numbers to 
the right of the verse rather than the left and things like that.

--Chris