Words of Jesus and Verse markers

Question

I have a question on the use of the \wj marker, and verse boundaries. Should the \wj marker be closed and reopened at all verse boundaries? Without closing and reopening, everything looks right (the verse numbers are even red), but Paratext basic checks complain that the character style isn’t closed.
Thanks
BEH

Answer 1

Yes, this is how we had to do it. Also closing and reopening around footnote callers and xrefs, etc. It is tedious. I wish there was an automated way to select a whole section of Christ’s speech, and then type \wj , and have PT8 open and close the \wj spans as needed with the selection. As is, it took hours just to do Luke, and I’m still finding places where I messed it up. (But the Project Plan Checker helps. And in the end, it is worth the effort.)

Comments

Yes, I was able to automate the majority of it with regular expressions, but it still took a bit of work.
BEH

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Nice! I wonder if your regular expressions could be incorporated into PT8.1.1.

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Sorry, I didn’t see that you had replied.
It might be possible to write several that cover the possibilities, not sure. In the project I was working on, there were several different things breaking up the \wj
For a \wj marker that was broken up by verses, the regular expression I used was
(\\wj [^\\]+)(\r\n\\v \d+(-\d+)? )
Replacement string
\1\\wj*\2\\wj
In the replacement string, there is a final space after the \\wj
Basically, it searches for non marker text, followed by a verse marker, and then closes the \wj before the verse marker, and reopens after.
Also, if I recall correctly, if doing a replace all, you have to rerun this multiple times.
BEH

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Here’s a useful trick: You can handle embedded notes and refs, AND you won’t need to rerun this multiple times if you limit the scope of RegExPal search using the triple-colon context specifier, like this:

Find:

(?s)\\wj[\s\r\n].*?\\wj\*:::(([\r\n]*\\v [0-9-]+ )|(\\f .*?\\f\*)|(\\x .*?\\x\*))

Replace with:

\\wj* \1\\wj\u0020

Definitely mark a point in project history before applying this blindly.

Note that if you opened \wj after the paragraph mark and before the verse number, you’ll end up with an empty \wj\wj*. A simple find and replace can delete all of these.

Answer 2

yes WJ needs to be closed each time you come to another marker

Answer 3

Do we have any intention to address this?

Comments

I’ve made a Paratext custom tool to automatically generate all the \wj tags you need, opening and closing them in all the necessary places. All you have to do is open your project in Glyssen, let it assign Jesus his speaking parts where unambiguous, and then in the remaining ambiguous cases (e.g. Jesus and Peter both speaking in the same verse), you can quickly assign the right character. It’s a pretty quick process. Then view and export the recording script, and the WordsOfJesus custom tool will do all the work for you. I’d like to test this tool on a wide variety of projects. Please let me know if you’d be willing to help with this. Thanks!