How does an Administrator "opt in to the Whitespaces and invisible character support features implemented in 9.5 beta"

Question

I do not understand why the the instructions for 9.5 beta say "all team members must update to 9.5.":

for a project administrator to opt in to the Whitespaces and invisible character support features implemented in 9.5 beta, all team members must update to 9.5.

• First I do not see an"opt in" button. 
• Second, I was able to click the "Show invisible characters" button and see the spaces, is that what is meant by opting in?
• Third I was able to change Word Separator slashes to the u+200B character and then view the project in 9.4. I could not see the ZWSP. characters in 9.4, but I could still edit the project.

Could someone explain more clearly how one "opts in", what irreversible thing happens, and what the consequences are if one opts in if a team member has not upgraded?

Answer 1

Here is a sort of quick - down - and dirty video on opting into the whitespace option of PT9.5 Beta.

Comments

Thanks Phil this is a great answer!

Answer 2

See Phil's video for how to opt in.

The main consequence is that when an administrator opts in to Whitespace and invisible characters, Paratext will update the minimum required version of Paratext that can update the project so that users without 9.5 won't be able to open the project. This needed to be done since editing done by earlier versions could remove some of the whitespace characters that can not be added in 9.5.

Answer 3

I've submitted feedback already, but I'll put my own observations here too.

I think the release documentation ought to explain why and when "opting in" is necessary. I had many of the same confusions as Kent when I experimented with the new feature.

I think it should be clarified that anyone can use the button to visually see the whitespaces. For some projects (such as one I'm working with) that may be all that's needed because we already have the ability to keyboard any whitespaces we need. It's the ability to insert new whitespaces via PT that's an opt-in feature.

Thanks to John for his helpful answer. I had been questioning why this was a breaking feature, but I do remember that 9.4 and before deleted certain whitespaces, so I see how that wouldn't be compatible with this new system. (Obviously, the whitespaces that our teams need aren't the ones that get deleted, so I had forgotten about that behavior.)