Sometimes Paratext preserves newlines in a comment, other times not.

Question

When making a note, I often want to have a list of things which are done with adding newlines. Sometimes the note then appears without the newlines, making it difficult to read. For example:

In later chapters we have different translations:9:27 voto mauuna tani tiuaa nitturuu11:31 voto mauuna, aue ealutu nitturuu12:11 voto mauuna tani tiuaa nitturuuIn Matthew 24:15 we have voto sesaaili aue elutu elome tale ale manga ateva, me eghelei taumattu ngatoa la kasu vulia me ale manga ateva aue enim tokaIn Mark 13:14, it is voto karika liuna tani lutu me eghelei taumattu ngatoa la kasu me ale manga ateva aue enim tokaWe probably need to make them all more similar.

I haven't been able to see a pattern in when the newlines get removed. Is it a bug or is there something I need to do to make it appear as separate paragraphs?

Comments

What version of Paratext were you using?

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The latest, with auto-update turned on. Currently 9.5.110.1.

Answer 1

When a note is being edited, the text is being displayed as HTML. When the note is saved, this HTML is converted into XML and sometimes the conversion fails. Paratext tries to preserve as much formatting as it can but will just keep the text in the worst case.

I'm not sure what causes some of the unexpected structure in the HTML. It may be related to pasting content from other sources but there must be other causes also.

We have a couple of bugs related to this in our "to do" list, so we will be trying to improve our HTML => XML conversion.

Comments

Certainly some notes like the one I originally showed have had text pasted in from other places. I will have to see if that is the common factor that might be the source of the problem. If so, that makes it easier for me to avoid it!

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Like what's been said above, I run into this bug most often when pasting from other places (though I can't confirm that's the ONLY time it happens).

One trick I've found is to make sure the text being pasted in is in plain text format, not in HTML format. That's a little tricky, because you can't always SEE that it's html. (If I'm struggling with an existing note, I just copy all the content out of the note, into an external program, and then back into the note.)

I typically paste the text into a program like Notepad++, then immediately copy the exact same text out of Notepad++ and paste it into PT. When you copy out of Notepad++, it's only putting the text information in the clipboard, not any html information.
Actually, I often just paste it into our back translation in PT, then copy it out of there and paste it into the flag (the BT works like Notepad++, only retaining the text and not the html formatting). Then, I usually remember to delete the temporary text out of the BT. 

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Interesting observation. I have seen the same issue (newlines and bold/italic disappearing) quite regularly. I very often paste text from the PT project in question into the note, almost never from  or via another application. So if the erratic behaviour is triggered by pasting text, this includes text from PT itself.