[sword-devel] osis2mod and WoC

[DM Smith]

I'd like to propose a change to osis2mod and get consensus before making 
the change.

The goal of osis2mod is to allow any valid OSIS as input and to 
transform it, if necessary to a form that SWORD apps can handle, and do 
it in a loss-less manner. However, that is not reality. An encoder needs 
to create OSIS that the SWORD engine, front-ends and osis2mod expects.

Today the KJV and the ESV are the only OSIS modules with the Words of 
Christ (aka WoC, aka red letter text) marked up.

In beta there are several more, but none of them show properly across 
all front-ends.

The markup in the KJV and ESV are tedious. The problem comes when a 
quote is interrupted, perhaps with "added" or parenthetical comments, or 
when a quote spans verses or even chapters (e.g. the Sermon on the 
Mount). Also, both the KJV and ESV require the OSISqToTick hack that 
suppresses the automatic generation of quotation marks when the marker 
attribute is not present.

The solution has been for the encoder of the input to osis2mod to encode 
the OSIS in a way that the SWORD engine and the front-ends can handle. 
However, the goal would be to allow the Sermon on the Mount to have a 
quote start in Chapter 5 and a quote end in Chapter 7, greatly 
simplifying the encoders job in marking the WoC.

It is rather straight forward to markup the text so that it can work. 
But today it falls on the OSIS input encoder to do. I'd like to 
recommend that we move the processing into osis2mod.

Ultimately this solution recognizes that the <qelement serves two 
purposes in SWORD:
1) Determination of which quote marks to use and where.
2) Determination of what text to mark up as red-letter-text.

These would be handled distinctly and separately and result in a module 
that is encoded like the KJV or the ESV (these differ in that the KJV 
doesn't have quote marks anywhere) and the OSISqToTick would not be 
necessary.

Further, this change would be compatible with 1.5.9.

If interested, there is a discussion in the wiki concerning how this 
would be marked up.
http://www.crosswire.org/wiki/index.php/Talk:Modules_in_the_beta_repository

In Him,
    DM