[sword-devel] overline

[Chris Little]

Troy,

In r2973, you added some handling for <hi rend="ol">...</hi> in OSIS 
documents being converted to plaintext that I would like to see 
disappear quickly and forever on account of being all kinds of bad.

First, this is not valid OSIS. rend is not an attribute on any OSIS 
element. Switching rend to type at least brings it closer to OSIS validity.

But "ol" is still not a valid type for hi, and doesn't conform to the 
standards for naming character styles in OSIS (or TEI). In both OSIS and 
TEI, the corresponding CSS property value is used, so it should be 
"overline" in either case. I see there's apparently a bug in OSIS and 
overline was left out of the hi types, so you'd need to use "x-overline" 
for OSIS (or "overline" for a corresponding TEI document).

More generally, the implementation of overline markup to plaintext 
handling has some undesirable features. Using the filter inserts 
characters into the character string to simulate a textual style with 
actual additional characters. I can't imagine the use case in which 
interleaving real character data with presentation-simulating characters 
is the right course of action. We don't do any sort of 
presentation-simulation for other hi types, but the nearest thing I can 
imagine to appropriate plaintext presentation would be something like 
markdown, e.g. *bold*, /italic/, _underline_, ¯overline¯.

\uXXXX escapes are only supported by C++11. Using this needlessly cuts 
off support for older compilers, which are likely to still be in use on 
plenty of aging platforms.

I see now that the OSIS to (X)HTML filters got support for <hi 
rend="ol"> back in 2011, and I would likewise strenuously advocate the 
removal of that in favor of support for markup that is at least valid 
OSIS (<hi type="x-overline">).

--Chris