Finding and removing RTL marks

Question

A project I've been providing technical support to has RTL marks sprinkled throughout where they don't belong. The project is a back translation of a RTL project, but all of the text is in English.

I don't know how they got there, but I did notice that the RTL marks are mostly in or near verse numbers:

\v 2[RTL mark] Text of verse 2

From what I understand, in a RTL project, when a verse range is specified (e.g. 1-2), a RTL mark is placed before the hyphen to cause the verse range to be rendered correctly. Since this project is based on a RTL project, perhaps the USFM structure, and hence the RTL mark, was copied into the daughter project? That doesn't explain why the RTL mark would be present when there is not a range, but perhaps the versification was changed at some point.

Can Paratext be made to show invisible control characters? As far as I could tell, the basic checks were not catching the RTL mark.

Answer 1

I am unaware of a setting to display invisible characters all the time. What about opening the SFM file in a separate text editor that can display invisible characters?

Just be aware Paratext won't be keeping track of your changes if you edit outside of Paratext. So you may want to do a Mark point in history first (Project menu). It should pick back up on changes when you do a send/receive, but it just won't track them while you make them externally.

Comments

Thanks. Is there a good editor to recommend for seeing invisible characters? I used VS Code to see the markers, but I'm reluctant to recommend VS Code to users that are less technical.

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I like Notepad++, which has the option to show invisible characters.

My understanding is that the PT team is currently working on an update that will allow us to see invisible characters within PT. I'm not suggesting you wait, because it could be a while, but know that it's a feature which should be on the horizon.

From your description it sounds like you don't want *any* RTL characters. If you want to just blindly remove all of them, you can do a find/replace where you find this:
regex:\u200F
and replace it with nothing.