Fix "missing capitals" errors

Question

When I run Basic Checks, I get heaps of errors like: “MRK 1:2 Text of marker/style does not begin with a capital: q1”, and “MRK 1:13 Missing capital after sentence final punctuation: )”. Where does one define where capitals should and should not be expected? or what constitutes “sentence final” punctuation, for that matter? I tried searching Help and found (there used to be?) a tool in Wordlist, but it is not there for me…

Answer 1

Hi Paul

      There are some Inventories under the Checking menu in Paratext. Selecting Checking displays the following:

      Inventories are Paratext's way of telling you what it found. Notice that the last three in the piece of the menu I showed above have to do with Capitalization (**cap**).

There are 3 inventories specifically dealing with capitalization.

      The messages you shared have to do with the first of the 3 **cap**           inventories.

Markers Followed by a Lower Case Letter

      In the project I selected it gave the following markers missing a Capital right after the marker:

    These initially appear with a blue question mark waiting for you to say if these are valid combinations.
      If you run the check before validating the entries in the Inventory they will all appear as errors.

Any markers that are ** character markers** like \ft & \it could be okay. However, I would typically mark those as ** invalid** (especially with a small number of occurrences), then run the cap checks. I would “Deny the error” in the list window for any lowercase instances that are OK.

The others are ** “paragraph” markers** . q1 & q2 are poetry markers and could easily begin with lowercase. If there are a very few, again I would mark them as invalid and deny the error for those that are okay. then you might want to see if those lowercase occurrences make sense.

      If there are a huge number of \q1 & \q2 I would mark those entries as **valid**.

      Markers such as title markers \mt,\mt1,\mt2,\mt3 I would mark as invalid and run the **          cap**           basic check. Then you can deny those that are OK and correct those that are not OK. Typically \mt and \mt1 begin with an uppercase letter. \mt2 & \mt3 begin most frequently with lowercase.

      The \io2 is an introduction outline level 2. I would suggest that all outline paragraphs should begin with uppercase letters and therefore would mark \io markers beginning with a lowercase letter as invalid.

Comments

Thanks for the reply anon467281. Had you meant to include pictures? I’m having a hard time following your instructions as they seem to point to them…

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Yes. Images were meant to be inluded. Maybe I’ll have to recreated the message using Gmail and see if that makes a difference,

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anon467281:

Maybe I’ll have to recreated the message using Gmail and see if that makes a difference,

If you’re going to format your response with pictures, etc., it’s probably best to use the website to create your response to make sure it looks correct. You’re first response is almost unreadable on the website. I was going to edit it to format it better, but I gave up.

Answer 2

The parameters for checking capitalization are defined under Checking > Markers Missing Final Sentence Punctuation Inventory > Options. There you can define your sentence-final punctuation, specify which markers start a new sentence (and therefore start with a capital letter), which markers to ignore, etc.

Comments

Thanks for the help. I found what I was looking for in Checking > Markers~Punctuation Followed by a Lower Case Letter… [Paratext 7.5 calls it differently. I’m still using PT7.5.]