How do I see the history of changes to a verse?

Question

To view the versions of a project in which there were changes to one or more verses:

1. Click anywhere in one verse or highlight text across multiple verses.
2. Right-click and select View History for Verse(s).
   By default, the Current Version is displayed in the left pane and its Baseline is displayed in the right pane.
3. Optional: If you want the Current Version to appear in the right pane and its Baseline in the left pane, from the View menu, select Swap Panes.

Tips:

• If you hover over the date of a version in the drop-down list of either pane, the time when the earlier version was created is displayed in 24-hour notation with a Greenwich Mean Time offset.
• A Verse History window displays the differences (added/deleted text) in the same display style (for example, green highlight or red highlight) and number of panes as you select for the Compare Texts window.

Further Tasks

For specific instructions on what you might want to do next, expand the section below which describes your goal.

Find missing text, or a former translation for a particular word or passage

1. With the Current Version in one pane, select a previous version from the other pane.
   Repeat this step until you find the version:
   • that has the missing text, or
   • which has the former translation of the word or passage.
2. Right click an individual change and select Restore removed text or Restore changed text to restore:
   • the missing text, or
   • the former translation.

See changes between significant milestones, or compare versions at particular times or dates

Examples of milestones are before and after peer review, community review, or a consultant check.

1. From one drop-down list:
   • select the version before the significant milestone, or
   • select a version for a particular time or date.
2. From the other drop-down list:
   • select the version after the significant milestone, or
   • select a version for a different time or date.

See step-by-step changes, or who made what changes and when

With Baseline in one pane:

1. Select a previous version from the other pane.
2. From the other pane:
   • select the version that is previous to the one you just chose, or
   • select another version.
     Repeat this step until you have seen as much history as you want to see.

See also:

• [What does the color and formatting in a window which compares texts mean?](http://support.paratext.org/t/what-does-the-color-and-formatting-in-a-window-which-compares-texts-mean/635)
• [How do I change the color and formatting in a window which compares texts?](http://support.paratext.org/t/how-do-i-change-the-color-and-formatting-in-a-window-which-compares-texts/577)
• [How do I view changes that have been made since an earlier project progress stage?](http://support.paratext.org/t/how-do-i-view-changes-that-have-been-made-since-an-earlier-project-progress-stage/272)
• [How do I compare the differences between two texts?](http://support.paratext.org/t/how-do-i-compare-the-differences-between-two-texts/33)
• [How do I find a previous version of a project?](http://support.paratext.org/t/how-do-i-find-a-previous-version-of-a-project/529)
• [How do I review changes made to a text?](http://support.paratext.org/t/how-do-i-review-changes-made-to-a-text/516)

* [How do I revert text from an earlier version of a project?](http://support.paratext.org/t/how-do-i-revert-text-from-an-earlier-version-of-a-project/541)

Answer 1

The reason the Verse History dialog does not allow you to do what you want is because it wouldn’t give you what you want when you do it. I actually had many discussions with the designers explaining why this exact scenario couldn’t work correctly (at least not in all cases). I’m not great at explaining things, but I’ll try explain here.

First, realize the history for a project is complicated. Paratext keeps most of this complexity hidden, but with everyone changing things on their own computers and then doing a S/R at various points (and especially when using a USB stick that is passed around), the history for a project is not linear. Below is a screenshot of a program called TortoiseHg displaying the history of a real project. Each line shows a different history “path” that eventually gets sent to everyone else via merging. It shows how various history points are dependent on other history points, but which history points they are dependent on is determined by who a user last did a S/R with and the order the S/Rs happen.

image.png756×847 147 KB

Because of the non-linear nature of the project history, there is no good way to display a list of changes in the Compare Texts and Verse History dialogs and have the user be able to choose one history point on one side of the dialog and choose the previous history point on the other side and give them what they want. Basically, the problem is that two different changes to a verse may have the same parent (this causes a merge conflict, but does happen, of course). If you would choose both of those changes in Verse History (because they are next to each other in the list of changes), you wouldn’t be seeing what changed in one, but the difference between the two changes - not what you were looking for.

In the Verse History dialog, this problem is made even worse because history points that anon421222’t contain a change to the verse in question are filtered out. This means there may be many project history points between the first and second item shown in the list in the Verse History dialog. If you were to choose the same two revisions in the Compare Texts tool, you would see all changes that were done between the two history points as well (probably not what most users would ever want).

This is why a button to go to the next difference does not exist in the Verse History dialog.

All that being said, with Paratext 7.6, we realized that for the Verse History dialog, what users really wanted, is to know when a change was made to a verse and who made it (what you were looking for) and that they might want the same thing in the Compare Texts dialog (i.e. what was changed for this history point). After much discussion, this birthed the new pseudo-history item called Baseline. Baseline is always the parent history point for the history point in the other pane. This new pseudo-history point gives users the ability to ask “what was changed in this revision” - significant, since before this change, users had to guess what the parent of a history point was to get this information correct. For the Verse History dialog, the history point representing the Baseline is probably not even included in the list of history points shown in the list.

Theoretically, if the user is comparing against the Baseline in the Verse History dialog, we could show the same in the Compare Texts dialog and that would give you what you wanted. However, it would require users to not change off of the Baseline comparison so it would probably be difficult trying to explain why that would be required in the UI.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that in 8.0, the Verse History dialog is now completely outside the scroll groups. There is now no way to view changes in other locations because any changes in other verses may be artificial (i.e. they may be caused by multiple other history points).

Answer 2

Feeling something out before submitting a Feature Request …

Unlike the Compare Texts window, this one has no toolbar. I think it should have – here’s the scenario that just played out:—

I wanted to know who made a change to a specific verse in MAT, so I used View Verse History – a feature I’ve never used in anger (never used when I actually needed it): brilliant! – only a few records down the history list was the relevant point. I was able to set the righthand pane to that point, and the lefthand pane to the next point to confirm that this was indeed where the change was made.

It was me that had made the edit, and I noticed that att he same time I’d also edited LUK. This made me wonder whether the change in LUK was similar to the punctuation change I’d made in MAT, since they’re synoptic, and the same passage was probably in both. But there was no button to jump to the next difference between the versions in the two panes . So no way to quickly find the other change.

Since this window is identical to the Compare Texts window, it looks like a conscious decision was made to suppress the toolbar. But, as my scenario shows, there are still times when you might need it, even though the feature is designed to focus on one verse.

Answer 3

I also noticed that this window opens with the Group set to “A”. I think it should open with the same Group setting as the Bible edit window that you open it from (In my case that window was set to “D”).

Answer 4

I just tried to use the “Verse History” feature in the Introduction INT book and was surprised that the option was grayed out.

While I acknowledge that you wouldn’t usually mark up an introduction with verse numbers, we did it precisely to make tracking changes easier. I see that the history is there in the background–I checked using TortoiseHG–so I’m confused why it isn’t available in PT. The Compare Texts tool works but isn’t as useful as Verse History (there are too many edits to other books).

I would assume that if people hadn’t marked up the introduction with verses, Verse History would simply treat the entire chapter as a single verse, but that if they had then it would work as it does in regular Scripture books.

Does that feature only work in canon books, but not in peripheral books? Is there a specific reason it was left out, or should I send in a feature request?

Comments

mnjames:

Does that feature only work in canon books, but not in peripheral books? Is there a specific reason it was left out, or should I send in a feature request?

There were problems with showing the verse history for books that anon421222’t contain chapters. It was decided that we should just disable the menu item for all peripheral books. I think it would be fine to send in a feature request.

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I wonder how difficult it would be to program PT thus: if a book has no verse markers, treat every paragraph – or, maybe better, every sentence – as a verse, i.e. treat it exactly as a verse would be treated by PT in one of the 66 normal Bible books.