Paratext reference Extra Material not accepted

Question

I haven't used the "Extra Material" in the reference format for a while, and now that I'm trying to use it, it can't get it to work.

I put the following string in the field: "Chiif |Voir |S ". I included "S " because that was the example given in the help. But I can't get any of this "Extra Material to be accepted by Paratext. References are fine (e.g. when I remove the Extra Material), but fail as soon as it's added:

(Tried to insert a tiny image, but couldn't post the Question... gave error "Maximum length is 12000 characters. What's that all about? The image just showed "\r (S Mat 26.20-25; Mar 14.17-21)" in the project, and the S Mat reference has red X and red underline.)

If I hover over the error it says "Invalid book: S Mat". What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Jeff - what is your abbreviation for Matthew? If it is S Mat then you don't need the extra material. It creates a conflict because Paratext doesn't know if this is extra material or the name. Remove the S from the abbreviated form and it should work. However, if the only place this is used is in the abbreviated form of the name then I would put it there rather than as extra material which is presumed to be only used occasionally - like voir.

Comments

This was just in a test project and the abbreviations were empty - I just had the short names (which were set to Mat, Mar), and the References were set to use the short name. When I added the abbreviations, it started working as expected. So I thought I had found a bug ("if the abbreviation is empty, the Extra Material doesn't work", or something like that...). But then I removed the abbreviations again... and it still worked! So I'm not sure exactly what happened, but it looks like if you have the abbreviations and short names filled in, the Extra Material should probably work as expected. Thanks for your input.

Answer 2

Mostly unrelated to your question, but to insert an image you need to click the image button during editing and use the Upload tab to upload a image file (which means you need to save it to a file first).

Unfortunately, just pasting the image into the editor does not work (as you saw).

Answer 3

We had a similiar problem with "S" at the end of references, e.g. "Mat 26,20S". I guess, it's not possible to have single characters as extra materials when they are at the same time the first character of a book name.
Possible solutions:

a) Replace this "S" in the project with another unique character, e.g. "Σ" (That's what we did first)
b) In our case, we eventually used "\xt Mat 26,20\xta S", but that is not directly viable with \r