Basic Check warning Parentheses usually do not surround references in \r for this project

Question

When running Basic Check in my Paratext project, I receive the following warning:

“Parentheses usually do not surround references in \r for this project.”

Observation:
I have carefully reviewed the entire project and confirmed that all \r markers consistently use parentheses around the references (for example: \r (John 3:16)).
There are no instances where \r references appear without parentheses.

Concern:
Despite consistent usage across the project, the warning continues to appear in Basic Check.

Request for guidance:
Could you please advise:

• Why this warning is still being triggered even though all \r markers use parentheses?

• Whether this could be related to project settings, legacy content?

• If there is any project-level configuration or refresh step required to resolve this warning?

Thank you for your assistance.

Kind regards,
Prabhu

Answer 1

Hola Prabhu.

Paratext determines whether references in \r should have parentheses or not based on consistent usage within your project. I mean that there is no configuration space where you can check whether they have parentheses or not. The program analyzes how most references appear: if most are in parentheses, it expects all of them to be; if most do not use them, it expects none of them to have them.

From the message you received, I see that Paratext verifies that most references do not actually have parentheses.
Without further information, I would suggest that you check all the books in your project. For example, if you are currently working only on the New Testament but have the text of the entire Old Testament as a reference, Paratext will take all these books into account when counting whether a reference has parentheses or not.

You can open the marker inventory and search for the marker \r to quickly see which usage is most common.

If you know how to use Regex, you can also count the \r that start with parentheses and those that don't, which will give you the count that Paratext is getting.
If you are absolutely sure of your parenthesis count in \r, I encourage you to file an error report.

Saludos,
Pepe.

Answer 2

Thank you. I received help from Phil and was able to identify the issue. The problem was in the language settings, where parentheses were included in the Alphabetic Characters list. As suggested by Phil, I removed the parentheses, and the issue has now disappeared.