First, let's look at what's wrong with the current Pulpit commentary. It leaves a lot to be desired:
- Most verses have many missing comments. The Homiletics and Homilies are not included for many verse ranges. The reader never sees them! Most readers miss 75% of the commentary!
- It has an RTF header that prevents font resizing.
- All Greek words are missing.
- Verse errors abound, some obvious like those in tooltipping and some not so obvious, like where someone (before me) tried to make implicit references explicit by assuming all implicit references like (13:3) in the book of Matthew should be Matthew 13:3. Well, some weren't Matthew references (just using Matthew as an example).
- The formatting isn't not what I would have done--it needs paragraph spacing and clear differentiation between Exposition, Homily, Homiletics, etc.
The real format of the Pulpit Commentary is:
Exposition (verse by verse, most specific comments here at the top, first).
(---Users of the current edition rarely see beyond this line---)
↓
Homiletics (a chapter is split into two or three passages, like Matthew 1-17 for one comment, 18-25 for another comment)
↓
Homilies By One Author (random verses)
↓
Homilies By Another Author (random verses)
↓
Homilies by Yet Another Author (random verses)
(up to 6 or 7 of these types of homilies, each homily having 1-20 verse comments. There's a LOT of material here)
Let's take a look at some screenshots when we try to put this together:
Pulpit-matthew1-1.png. Matthew 1:1. Notice how the exposition of Matthew appears before the homilies and homiletics. Just like in the printed edition. Good.
Pulpit-matthew1-2.png. Matthew 1:2. Notice how the secondary content like homiletics and homilies appear first. And the primary exposition is buried (Matthew 1:2, in this case, does not even show on the screen it's so far down). No good. Not like the printed edition. Causes the reader to dig through pages of content to find the verse exposition.
Do you see the inconsistency here? The first screenshot shows a verse specific comment FIRST. Then the secondary comments. The second screenshot shows all the secondary comments first before the verse specific comments. e-Sword sorts the verses "wrong" for multiple comments (or sorts in a way that produces inconsistent results for the end-user). e-Sword should give the module maker a way to control which verse/passage comments appear first (like database record order, like the Dictionaries use) or somehow sort it so it makes sense for all commentaries. Other software supports this. Why can't we?
When dealing with commentaries like this (Pett, Langes, Pulpit Commentary, plus others that will appear), my options are dwindling.
- Make it as shown above, with the verse exposition buried below all the homilies and homiletics for certain passages--the inconsistent handling of these passages makes it difficult to use. But do it that way anyway and the user just has to "deal" with it?
- Make a sloppy resource for e-Sword by putting comments in places 99.99% of users will never find them (like chapter comments or book comments)? This forces the primary verse exposition to the top by putting the other comments in book or chapter comments--which means they don't exist for 99.95% of users.
Edited by Josh Bond, 16 February 2012 - 07:39 PM.
Removed verbage that gave the wrong impression . :)
