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[Kieran Clancy <question135799@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

New question #135799 on OpenLP:
https://answers.launchpad.net/openlp/+question/135799

Hi there,

I refer to: http://wiki.openlp.org/Scratchpad:Formatting_Codes

First, I'd like to echo the comment made by M2J on the Talk page there -- "Why do we have to invent our own formatting codes? Why can't we reuse HTML or BBCodes etc?"

But more than that, I think that hard-coding colours into songs is really the wrong way to do things.

What would be much better is to separate the content and the presentation. That is, the colours should be in the themes, not in the songs. For example, you might want to use blue text to emphasise lines in some songs, and it might look great on a white background. But blue might look really wrong on a blue background; so the colours you choose for the song depends on the theme and should not usually be hard coded in a song.

Personally, I think that we should try to get some understanding of how formatting might be used and then make that part of the theming rather than the songs per se.

For example, maybe we'd like to show all the choruses in a slightly different colour.

If we could make a song like:

song verse 1
blah blah

song verse 2
blah blah

[chorus]
chorus
etc
[/chorus]

Then the formatting for "chorus" could be specified in the theme (for some themes it might just be bold, for others it might be a different colour).

You could also have formatting codes for bridge, refrain, pre-chorus, manpart, womanpart, etc. Parts of the songs that are not sung could also have formatting codes; title, repeat instructions, verse numbers, etc. This seems to me to be a more useful approach to formatting.

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