[xiphos-users] ideas for the future

[Karl Kleinpaste]

On 08/11/2017 04:39 PM, Muddleglum Smith wrote:
> I recently wanted to search in the ante-Nicene fathers.
> 1. Could you allow searches in books, please?
Simple sidebar search is for Bibles and commentaries only. Open the
Advanced Search window (Edit -> Advanced Search, or F3) for full
generality, including searching any module.

> 2. Is there any way to split books up like the Bible is split up?
>  a. We could type in, for example, joseph.wars.2.1 or similar to look
> up references quickly.
>  b. We could run searches in specific groups of authors or times.
Range-based searches are available for Bibles and commentaries, both
sidebar and advanced. Sword doesn't support ranges in general books, sorry.

You can define sets of books to be searched at once in adv.search.

The completely random nature of genbook keys makes it pretty much
impossible, I think, to allow abbreviated key selection as you suggest. 
That is, for example, Bible book names are standard, codified, known to
all, so "gen" means Genesis to everybody. The example you offer,
"joseph," could mean either Josephus or the Joseph Smith Translation
(which Crosswire has, under the cult/unorthodox heading). And that's
just the module name. The key within the module is even less specified,
the ambiguity and randomness is too great.  Genbook keys have no
regularity other than using '/' as an element separator.

> That would require more generalized handling of the databases, but, of
> course, that will be easy if crosswire had written their program well
> in the first place
You've just stepped to the edge of being insulting.

There are sound reasons in the realm of formal information theory for
why it is flatly impossible to "write a program correctly" for future
use of a sort that is unknown at the time of writing.  Software goes
through updates for a reason -- because we find wonderful and horrifying
new things we want to do with it that nobody ever thought of before.

> Search result Bible version mungering.
> Suppose that a user wanted to search for a strong's number. Suppose
> that that user wanted the results in a version that did not have
> strong's numbers. Is there an easy way to change the results to
> display in any version requested?
Search 2TGreek for lemma:G1401, then search again using "last search"
(in sidebar scope) or "current results" (in adv.search scope) to
re-search a different module within the previous result set.

> Fixing module font shrinking display.
> It looks as if you fixed kretzmann's commentary. Thanks! Now go to the
> ABP version of the Bible and check out, for instance, Mark 2. The
> incredible shrinking font has struck again! :-)
We are (rather annoyedly) awaiting the 1.8.0 release of the Sword
engine, where this bug has been fixed for literally years.

Brian fixed Kretzmann separately, knowing that a (released) engine fix
would be a geological epoch coming.

> Dupped arrows.
> When I first come up in windows (10) I see two sets of arrows for the
> Bible book, chapter, and verse.
Yeah, that's some weird artifact induced by the recent WK2 fix. I don't
know what causes it yet. I'll fix it for 4.0.7.

> Finally, in regard to your request for reports of failures in Windows,
> could you add code to allow us Windows users to elect to log the stack
> in case of bombs, crashes, and assorted other mishaps?
If I knew how to do that, sure. We build Xiphos for Windows via
cross-compilation out of Linux using MinGW tools.  I am not yet aware of
a means by which to do what you ask.

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