On WinXP SP2 under FireFox, the decomposed form shows some problems in positioning the accent over the letter, but the accent is displayed. The composed looks great.
On WinXP SP2 under IE, the decomposed form shows lots of accent rendering problems, but each letter is there. In the composed form, the accented letters are replace with a box. I wonder if specifying Arial Unicode MS and a few others (code2000, ...) in front of the font that the page is using, whether that would help.
I'll look at it under Linux FC3 later.
Can we download these modules? I'd like to see what they look like under JSword.
Personally, I can never get the accents right. And composing Greek on my keyboard is a pain. I generally resort to cut and paste to do searching against Greek. But sometimes accents make all the difference. So I would want the ability to search using accents. I would love to be able to type in "photos" and get all the places that "light" is found in Greek. And I want the computer to figure out what I mean.
I have given some thought to how JSword ought to implement indexing accented text. Here is what I came up with.
1) The text needs to be indexed in multiple forms and the user needs to be able to indicate or software needs to detect which form to search. The forms I was planning on indexing were with accents, without accents and transliterated into a-z. When indexing with accents I was planning on using a decomposed form.
2) When a user submits a search with accents, it would be normalized into the same form as held in the index. The user could also specify that they wished to look for the words without regard to accents.
3) For display the text would be normalized to what works best for the platform, either canonical or decomposed. I would hope that the form in the module would be such that accents could be readily stripped. I think that is decomposed, but I have not looked at it yet.
The other thought that I had was, hey, while we are at it why not store the verse in the index and also index the OSIS canonical reference for the work. Then the index would form a complete module. (And with the verse store the boundaries for well-formedness... ;) And perhaps have an index per testament.
Troy A. Griffitts wrote:
Hey guys,
I've spent some time cleaning up a module submitted by David (dnr at crosswire dot org) which uses the base Westcott-Hort Accented GNT from CCEL and merges in the morphology tags from Maurice Robinson's WHNU text (our WHNU module). The result is an OSIS module that is fully UTF8 Accented Greek NT with Morphology. I'm really excited about this and it has taken me way too long to process this work (sorry guys). The only thing keeping this module from being the ULTIMATE replacement for our WHNU module is the lack of Nestle-Aland/UBS variants against the WH (the 'NU' part of our current WHNU module). Without these variants, we still cannot produce the Greek text which is the predominant base text used for all modern Bible translation work.
But it's still really cool! :)
Now, having said all this, we still have problems with the current module.
o Oddly, Unicode Greek encoding is not very standard. With Hebrew, everyone expected the extra work to compose consonants and vowels and accents, etc. They've already done the work (well, mostly). With Greek, there is a whole "Greek Extended" Unicode range defined containing precomposed characters. Some renderers desire characters precomposed, others like to do the composing themselves.
This issue makes things a little problematic. Most resources (including the ICU Unicode library) claim that canonical normal form is precomposed for Greek, and my firefox browser under linux looks great showing precomposed characters. IE running on _stock_ XP looks horrible. If one webpage has Greek precomposed characters, and someone enters a search string in decomposed characters, they obviously will not match, unless someone behind the curtain is being smart about things-- we have the necessary filters in place to handle this, but we need to think about the best choices: a) strip all accents before searching; b) NFC both the search string and the text before searching
I've spent some time making 3 Bibles available on our site: 1) unaccented; 2) accented precomposed; 3) accented decomposed
Here is a link which should show all 3 in parallel (you can click on words for definitions if you'd like :) ).
http://crosswire.org/study/parallelstudy.jsp?add=WHNU&add=WHAC&add=WHACD
We've specified in the HTML that the encoding is UTF-8 so all browsers have a fighting chance :)
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.
Thanks to everyone who have contributed and I'm excited about this new work!
-Troy.
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