Reassigning Notes

Question

Lots of Notes in our projects are assigned to the translator of that project – I’m sure that’s not unusual.

When a book is reassigned to a different translator (because a translator leaves the project, or dies, etc. – we’ve seen both of these events happen), it would be nice to reassign the Notes that are assigned to them. Is there any way to do this?

We also sometimes assign a different exegete to a book, presenting a similar situation.

Answer 1

Did this ever get answered? I have a team member to whom I had assigned literally hundreds of notes, but who has left the team. I would like to reassign these to (Team), and eventually I’d like to be able to assign blocks of that work to individual team members.

Comments

If the member has left (i.e there’s no risk of merging problems because he’s still editing), then you could edit his notes file in an external text editor. Like anything done externally to PT, this comes with a huge “use at your own risk” attached, but I’ve done it successfully many times in the past.

Go to your My Paratext 8 Projects folder, or whatever yours is called, then the TLA folder for the three letter acronym for your project, then look for a file called Notes_user name.xml. You can edit that file to replace all instances of
<AssignedUser>anything</AssignedUser>
to
<AssignedUser>Team</AssignedUser>

This would be overkill–it will assign all flags that user ever created to “Team”–but that probably won’t be a problem (you can decide).

Note that this make bulk reassigning to “Team” easy. But later assigning just certain sections to a particular member might be more complicated. It should be possible to create an advanced regex rule to change the AssignedUser based on what occurs in the VerseRef field, or something like that.

Of course I might be missing some extremely easy alternative option also.

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Looking into this, it seems like I’d end up replacing every instance where I assigned a note to her, which could change all the history of back-and-forth comments and resolved comments. I’m not sure I want to do that. Although it shouldn’t change the actual comments or who made them, so this might be acceptable. I’ll probably try 1 or 2 at first to see how this works out before editing the whole file.

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If you’re willing to do them one-at-a-time, then you can do it within PT. It doesn’t matter who originally assigned the note or who it is assigned to, you can jump in the middle and use your account to assign it to Team or anyone else.

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Wow! Tried this and changed 4 comments to Team. Now Paratext will no
longer load my project. Don’t try this anyone!

Anyone have a possible fix for this? I only changed the Assigned User
from Shelly Tyler to
Team
What happens now is that my project loads with a blank window no matter
what verse reference I use. Also, diamond-shaped question mark icons
take the place of non-English characters in the text preview in notes,
and every time I try to look at different notes, I get an error message
that there are missing verses (usually in Genesis or Exodus) and I
should run Basic Checks. I closed down and renamed the .BAK file from
last night (Notes_Brent .xml.BAK) to (Notes_Brent .xml)
and the same thing happens.
Update: Tried to change which file is the .BAK file, but this only creates a file with a .BAK.xml extension. Will deleting the project and redownloading it from the server replace all my notes files and fix this? I can send files if necessary, but can’t upload them to this thread.
Updated Update: Changed Windows 10 setting showing file extensions, so when I changed .BAK.xml there to .BAK, Paratext loaded fine. Hopefully, this will overwrite that (now) bad BAK file when I save my work today.

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If you are able to back up the project with the file menu, do so. Or copy the project folder somewhere safe. Then, in Paratext, delete the project, removing it from your computer only. Then do send/receive and collect the good project from the repository.

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I’m awfully sorry about that. It sounds like you have things back to working again, correct?

Your symptoms, particularly the diamonds, made me think that you had saved the xml file using some non-Unicode encoding like Ansi, or using line endings which PT couldn’t read. But I just saved the notes in my project using all sorts of bad encodings and couldn’t replicate your problem.

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Yes, everything seems to be working fine now. What program have you used
in the past to edit the xml file? I used Wordpad to edit it the first
time, literally only replacing my former colleague’s name with Team,
exactly as I had seen it in comments assigned to Team. I might try
Notepad when I’m sure this is straightened out, but I’m not sure that
there’s a text editor native to Windows 10 that doesn’t add things
“behind the scenes”.

Answer 2

I strongly suggest using Notepad++. It’s a very well-known text editor and edits the Paratext files without problems.

Comments

I fully agree with @anon291708 (and Notepad++ is also what I use). Unless you’re extremely careful, Notepad and Wordpad won’t necessarily save files in Unicode format or with user-chosen extensions like .xml (they often automatically add .txt regardless of what you want).

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To add to the recommendation for Notepad++; you should also download/install the USFM.xml file from https://github.com/DavidHaslam/USFM in order to add syntax highlighting to Notepad++ when editing USFM files. This makes it much easier to read the USFM file and catch errors in the USFM syntax.