I am trying to navigate my first transliteration project.
Background information
The team is starting typesetting, and has major Unicode problems. The project was converted to Unicode incorrectly, in such a way that the hacked font was converted into a Unicode hacked font, and so the hacked font is required to display the text. Switch to Times New Roman and all the wrong characters show – but Paratext thinks the project is already in Unicode so it is not possible to use the Convert Project tool, which only accepts a legacy encoded project as the source. I was about ready to give up when I realized I could create a TECkit to fix all the wrong encodings, and send the fixed transliterated file to the typesetter. It was a success! The team can keep working with their existing keyboards and fonts, but the text is all cleaned up in proper Unicode for the typesetter.
Issues
Updating the initial TECkit file was difficult. I got it working, but when I modified it, it took a long time to get it updated. At first, I kept the same file name, but nothing was changing. I made a new TECkit with the updated changes, and that didn’t help. Finally I learned by digging in this support forum that I need to go to the View menu and select “Refresh the Transliteration for ___”
That works for me, but so far the person on the team I am working with does not have an option to Refresh the Transliteration. It doesn’t even show on his menu when the T project is active. Trying to figure out if his role makes a difference, or if it is because it is using a system level TECkit in my computer’s repository that nobody else has access to.
Does the TECkit mapping get sent to all computers via Send/Receive? It gave me a warning when setting up. Wanted me to check the box to add it to the system repository or else it would only be in effect for the current session. That seems problematic because the system repository is not getting transferred via send/receive. If my only other option was to make it active for the current session, then that wouldn’t get sent either. We still don’t have the option to update on my colleague’s computer, even though he is now also an administrator. (All this is by email correspondence in French, so there is some room for misinformation)
What should a user’s role on a transliteration project be anyway? Since the project is not editable, you would think it would be Observer. However, I suspect that the observers are not seeing their changes reflected in the T project. What I fear mostly is that the only way the team gets to see changes is when I do S/R on both projects and the transliteration runs on my computer. That would be a disaster since I am only the computer support guy who is setting then up.
Lastly, (and this could be a separate topic) I activated font features on the T project to show literacy variants. As far as I can tell, none of the team is seeing the change in the font on their computers. And… even the other administrator on the project can’t open or edit the font features that I set for the transliteration project. I’d report this as a bug if I can understand exactly how T projects are supposed to work and what behavior is expected.