[Pkg-crosswire-devel] Miscellaneous responses to various threads

[Matthew Talbert]

> The SWORD lib (and it is properly branded in upper case) has one place
> where ICU is critical. If ICU is not present SWORD's upper case string
> converter will use an ASCII upper case routine (e.g. that from ctype) as
> a fallback, otherwise it will use a UTF-8 aware ICU routine. There are
> at least two places that this makes a difference:
> 1) The rendering of <divineName>Lord's</divineName> into all upper-case
> where the ' is a non-ASCII character. Without ICU, it breaks.
> 2) Dictionaries are keyed and indexed on upper case words. When a user
> selects a lower case word for lookup, it is uppercased. If it has
> non-ASCII characters, it breaks.

However, GnomeSword and BibleTime both provide their own string casing
function for this purpose, both using standard unicode definitions to
provide casing. So, as I've said, even if SWORD is built with ICU, it
will provide no benefit to the end user, and may lead to stability
issues.

Matthew