8 March 2025

Statement analysis in bibref

In this summary I give a short report on the recent improvements of the graphical user interface of bibref, based on the Qt framework.

More than two months ago I collected a list of expected features in my new year blog entry. I listed the improvements that should be implemented as next steps in the development. Now, bibref includes all these expectations, as of version 2025Mar06.
  1. Linux and Mac versions are working nicely. There are some minor differences in the Mac version, for example, the version number is not shown in the Help>About bibref menu option because of different guidelines for the user interface on macOS, recommended by Apple.
  2. The HTML/WebAssembly version is out. Some technical challenges (and their solutions) have been collected in the previous entry of my blog.
  3. Textual contents of warnings and errors have been greatly improved by adding an ID to the message, numbered by W1-W4 and E1-E19 and explained in a kind of appendix. In the future, these explanations can also be translated to other languages.
  4. Row and column numbers are shown in the Statement Editor (in the status line below). To implement this, I had to learn a lot on how Qt handles the QTextEdit object and the QTextCursor connected to it. It was fun, but really different from other techniques I was already familiar with.
  5. Parse information can be shown in a larger window with colors now. When pressing the button >, the position of a possible issue is reported in the Statement Editor as well, by highlighting the related part of the code.
  6. Some configuration and the state of the application (like the edited BRST file) will be automatically saved to the settings (being located on the disk). Qt has a simple mechanism to support that via a handy QSettings class. Also, general font size in the application can be fine-tuned in the Edit>Preferences menu option.
  7. Internationalization has been done only for Hungarian, but it should not be difficult to translate the texts (about 100 phrases) into any other language. Volunteers?
Here is a screenshot on the latest version, running on Linux as a flatpak application (to force English messages on my Hungarian system, I typed LANG=C flatpak run io.github.kovzol.bibref on the command line):

First, I loaded the Bible index database by selecting File>Add books. Then, in Quotation>Statement I chose an arbitrary BRST file, here StatResGNT/Luke/Luke-12,53+61.brst (which is located in the folder /var/lib/flatpak/app/io.github.kovzol.bibref/current/active/files/share/bibref-qt/statements/, at least on Ubuntu 24.04). After then, I resized the Statement Editor a bit, changed the overall cover to a different number (here from 58.46% to 59.46%) and selected Prove>Analyze in the Statement Editor. The Analyze window gives a detailed look on the checked properties and when scrolling down, the difference in the percentual data is also shown. When clicking on the right arrow, the related text is selected in the Statement Editor. When hovering the message in the Analyze window, a detailed explanation is given.

In fact, some errors can be auto-corrected (here, the percentual coverage could be fixed automatically), but this feature is available only in a command line tool at the moment. Eventually, such fixes will be provided in a future version of the graphical user interface, too.

Continue reading…

See also a filtered list of the entries on topics GeoGebra, technical developments or internal references in the Bible.

Zoltán Kovács
Linz School of Education
Johannes Kepler University
Altenberger Strasse 69
A-4040 Linz