Error: "Footnote caller is not the expected value (*)"

Question

I have a team who is getting lots of errors in the marker check: “Footnote caller is not the expected value (*)”.

I think I have solved the problem as I was writing this message, but I think it is worth still sending this in case others come across the problem.

The errors show only verses which have valid footnotes. That is, of the format
\f + \fr 2.23 \ft …\f*.

I confirmed with RegEx that the + was the only character used in valid footnotes. I used RegExPal to give me a count of the unique matches (\f . \fr). This confirmed that + was the only character used in valid footnotes.
The settings.xml has the +
+

Then just before sending this message I did another search in RegExPal (\f . .) and discovered that there were several hundred invalid footnotes in the New Testament that was done over a decade ago. These had manually defined callers (a b c …) but with no verse reference.

I still don’t know why Paratext was expecting * as the footnote caller, nor why only the valid footnotes were being reported as errors but at least I have a better understanding of the problem and assume the solution will be to correct the invalid ones so that it will accept the valid ones.

I think their second error “Most notes of this type do not have an origin reference.” is related. Once again it only lists what looks like valid footnotes. However, with 213 valid out of 700+ total footnotes, Paratext is correct - most of the footnotes don’t have an origin references, but they should! The valid ones are not the errors. In this case the majority are the errors with only a minority of correct ones.

Answer 1

A team I work with is having the same (almost) problem. They have just finished the Gospel of Mark and have inserted cross-references using \x + and defined digits (1-15) in the Langauge Settings as the caller to be used. It works fine but when the run Basic Checks they get 54 (the number of cross-refs) messages saying “Note caller is not the expected value (-)”. Why would PT be expecting the caller (-) when the team have defined a different set of callers in the Language Settings? What is more bizarre about this problem is that when I import the book into an empty “Test” project I set up with the same Language Settings, running Basic Cheks doesn’t produce any errors!

Comments

This error occurs when other places in the text have used \x - . What you can do is search for \x - and change it to \x + so that all references have the same format of \x +.

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Thanks. In just the one book or all books in the project. I’ve already done so for Mark?

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Paratext is considering all of the books.

Answer 2

I encountered this same situation. We had no \f * anywhere in the text, only \f + (normal footnotes) and \f % (a special kind of footnote, to be omitted from the printed book but retained in the digital version). There were more \f % in the text than \f + so Paratext decided that \f % was the expected form and flagged all the normal \f + footnotes. Since there were so many, it seemed like every footnote was being flagged, but later we realized that the \f % ones were not being flagged.

What sent us down a rabbit trail was the actual content of the error message. It said:
Note caller is not the expected value (*)
which led us to believe it was expecting an asterisk. If it had said
Note caller is not the expected value (%)
we would have realized right away what was happening. It seems that no matter what custom caller you’re using, if Paratext considers that caller to be the expected one, it shows (*) in the error message instead of the actual character. Showing the actual expected character in the error message would clarify things.

Answer 3

I believe that in this case Paratext is using the * as a wildcard and not to represent the character *. This may be unfortunate since some people do mark their footnotes with an *. In the first case mentioned, Paratext is actually using a variety of characters that are not the standard +. Therefore Paratext designates this with the *. Even in the case where all of the notes used %, Paratext sees this as something other than the standard + and designates it with the wildcard.

Answer 4

Hi anon703820

Have you fixed all the
footnotes missing the origin reference, either the \fr marker
or the actual ch/vs reference?

If so, I have created a
regular expression find and replace that

• inserts the missing \fr

  Find:(\\f \S+ )((\\f[^r])|(\d\S+))
Repl:\1\\fr \2

• insert the missing ch.vs reference.
  Find:(?s)(?<=\\c (\d+).*?\\v(\S+).*?\\f \S \\fr )(?!\d)(?=.*\\v)
Repl:\1.\2 for period cv separator
  Repl:\1:\2 for colon cv spearator

I have a third expression to make a reference end with ": " as in
be “ch:vs :”
Find:(\\fr \d+[:.][^ :]+) ?(\\f)
Repl:\1: \2

I have user menu options to do these three functions. To use,
edit usermenu.txt in your \My Paratext Projects root directory. If
that does not exist you can add the attached usermenu.txt to that
directory. It gives you many common tasks to perform related to
cleaning up a project.

FO-05 find fnote missing \fr origin ref marker#csd#(\\f \S+)((\\f[^r])|(\d\S+))
FO-05a add missing \fr to footnote#r#(\\f \S+)((\\f[^r])|(\d\S+))#\1\\fr \2

Admin Edit: Attempted to fix formatting from e-mail.

Answer 5

I’m having this problem but can’t figure out what I need to do from the responses above. I don’t know how to do regular expressions I’ve got two footnotes in John so far (and I’m not about to add anymore if I keep getting error messages on footnotes!) and on both I get a message saying:
“Note caller is not the expected value (*)”
and
"Most notes of this type do not have an origin reference.

The footnotes were added in Paratext using Insert Footnote.

I tried running a Marker check on Ruth which has a footnote but didn’t get these error messages but I can’t see anything different between them and the two that are marked as errors in John.

My Paratext may have weird things from the past because this project has been going on a long time and has been worked on in Shoebox, Toolbox, and even Word at one point. It has then gone through several upgrades of Paratext so there’s all kinds of things lurking in it!

Comments

Hi Ro, nice to see you here.
You are probably getting these messages because the form of the old footnotes in John do not use automatic callers \f + and standard origin references \fr C:V. Usually people want consistency so Paratext is warning you that the old footnotes are formatted differently from the ones put in using the standard method. In Ruth there are probably very few if any old footnotes so it is not warning you. You might open the footnote pane (F7) for these books to inspect the footnotes and verify this.

If you want to add the \fr references to John to get rid of the PT error message warning, you can use a special method to add them:

1. From the project menu under Project select Advanced>Insert missing origin references
   Tip: If you cannot see the Advanced menu item clink the down arrow at the bottom of the menu to see more choices.
2. In the Insert missing origin references window select Insert Missing \fr in footnote.
   
3. Click Choose Books and then select John
4. Click OK and then OK.
5. The \fr references will be added very quickly. View the footnotes in John and see how they were changed.
6. Run the basic checks The “Most notes of this type do not have an origin reference” errors should now be eliminated.

If you run this and want to get rid of the “Note caller is not the expected value (*)” errors. This can be “fixed” by making all footnotes use automatic callers. You can do this using the following Find/Replace (CTRL-H) that uses a Regular Expression":
Find:
regex:\\f\s+\S+\s*
Replace:
\f +
(Make sure there is a space after the +)

Hope this helps.

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CrazyRocky:

\f +

Hi, CrazyRocky, Long time no see!

Thanks for the response. I did both of the things you suggested and now no more error messages about footnotes. Thanks!

Answer 6

I’m not sure if the steps CrazyRocky mentioned automatically insert a Project History point. I would recommend doing that first: go to the Project menu > Mark point in history.

After CrazyRocky’s steps, running Basic Checks will help you see if there are remaining errors.

Also, if you want to quickly see a list of all of the footnotes in John, you can use Paratext RegEx Pal. With the list, you could quickly compare and find footnotes that don’t look like the others.

Click the Paratext menu > Advanced > RegEx Pal

In RegEx Pal:

1. Choose your project from the Project drop-down
2. In Find, put \\f .+?\\f\*
3. Go to the Tools menu > Choose Books
4. Choose the book(s) you want to find footnotes for
5. Click OK
6. Go to Tools > Count/Extract
7. Choose Extract
8. Select Include References
9. Click OK

This should give you a list of all of the footnotes in John (and/or whatever book(s) you choose).

I would suggest trying the other steps that CrazyRocky mentioned first, then try this if you’re still having issues.

Answer 7

As you have found, it can be very confusing to get errors when the syntax is correct. In Paratext 9, the checks are not just checking that you have the correct syntax but also if you have been consistent throughout your text.

Answer 8

Thanks. Sorted.