[sword-devel] OSIS -vs- font requirements

[Karl Kleinpaste]

The string "CSS" (case-insensitively) does not appear in Sword library
sources: If any such directives are found to be supported, it is done in
ignorance just because the engine passes them unmolested.  As an example
at hand, GnomeSword has no code to support CSS, other than what I wrote
myself, for internal use to support blocked pseudointerlinear display.
I have no knowledge of this kind of support in other Sword UIs; surely
the Windows UI cannot support it.

I am asking because I was looking at bible.org's NETnotes module and
realizing how much damage is done by the fact that it contains no font
support.  In both print and HTML, NET Bible's notes use a great deal of
font specification to provide high-quality Hebrew and Greek,
transliteration clarity, and the interesting one-character exotic Greek
figures used for witness names.

Anyone with an interest in this, please take a look at
http://karl.kleinpaste.org/.../font/
for some comparison screenshots, and see how bible.org's module suffers.

I have a strong sense that OSIS is loved because it attempts to achieve
purity by separation of structure from display.  But this is an area
where I am convinced that it is on the losing end.  I'll take a stance
of extremism, perhaps, to claim that 99% of the users of Sword Project
applications want to read well-formatted Bibles and other content, and
they don't care in the slightest about internal purity.  How could OSIS
(or its support in Sword) be augmented to handle this?

Perversely, although bible.org's NET Bible modules (3 flavors) are OSIS,
the 2 varieties of notes module are ThML.  So NETnotes could preserve
fonts in this manner, but the specifications were stripped out.