Linking Spelling Status

Question

I’m involved in a language where there are two parallel projects taking place. Since it’s the same language, spelling decisions in one project ought to be exactly the same as the other project.

At this time one of the projects has a moderately robust spelling status and the other one has no work done on spelling. If I use ntfs hard links to make the good SpellingStatus.xml file also appear in the second project’s directory, I’m fairly certain that it would allow us to update spelling in either project and have the status immediately changed in the second one.

I’m wondering if there is a better way of accomplishing the same goal that I’m missing.

And, I’m wondering if this will cause any issues, particularly with the Mercurial versioning system.

Answer 1

mnjames:

If I use ntfs hard links to make the good SpellingStatus.xml file also appear in the second project’s directory, I’m fairly certain that it would allow us to update spelling in either project and have the status immediately changed in the second one.

Unfortunately, that would not work. Paratext does not listen to external file changes. Thus, one project would overwrite the spelling of the other one since one project would not notice that the other one changed the file and the data is cached internally by Paratext (for speed reasons) for each project separately.

Comments

What if spelling decisions were only made in one project and mirrored over to the other project? The new results wouldn’t be available immediately, but presumably they would after a PT restart.

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mnjames:

What if spelling decisions were only made in one project and mirrored over to the other project? The new results wouldn’t be available immediately, but presumably they would after a PT restart.

It might work, but I’m not certain how Mercurial works with ntfs links. Also, I’m not sure how well that would work for S/R. If you try it, I would make sure you have a backup of the project (including history) in case something goes horribly wrong.

Answer 2

Perhaps you could clarify something. Are the same users involved in both projects, and are their permissions the same across both projects? It seems that your proposed method would essentially mirror any spelling-status changes made in one project to the other one. For this to work, the person making the changes would need to have permissions on both projects, I presume. It would also mean that they might need to be extra diligent about send/receive in both projects.

Hopefully some others will let us know if there are other technical concerns.

Comments

The users are all the same, and there’s really only one person who actually marks spelling so I don’t think permissions/conflicts would be an issue.

Answer 3

It is possible to copy the SpellingStatus.xml flie from one project to another. This will overwrite any status changes in the second project.