Where can I read more about "nonvernacular" and "nonpublishable"?

Question

A few days ago, I painfully found out that the tag “nonpublishable” inside a project usfm.sty is important and is being observed by PT8. I had searched for some time why a certain field was never showing in any print-drafts until I discovered this detail.

Now today I am looking for a suitable marker to put some notes into a growing glossary. I found \rem which is tagged as “nonvernacular” and which is …

Used for adding brief comments by a translator, consultant, or support person.

The text I type into \rem gets treated by some inbuilt (vernacular?) spell checker: New words are underlined with those squiggly lines. I did some tests and right-clicked and confirmed a few words in \rem:

They do not show up in the Wordlist, which is good, because they happen to be French and dummy words. The characters also do not show up in the (vernacular) character inventory, which is also good.

Still, I looked and found my test words inside SpellingStatus.xml which does not feel right, as they are not tagged there as non-vernacular. I will quickly undo those tests and will probably need to learn to overlook all those squiggly lines inside all \rem fields.

This is not a real problem, just trying to learn more about PT8 and about using its features correctly and properly.

Answer 1

I can confirm that \rem works the same for me. Words in the \rem marker do show the red squiggly, but do not appear in the wordlist.

We usually use \rem at the beginning of a book to give some background behind the book such as what it was adapted from, or when certain stages were completed. This is often helpful to the consultant or other remote people, and comes in handy when it has been years since a book was completed. I’m sure it could have many other uses as well.

Comments

Thanks for sharing.

Do you note your entries in \rem in the main language (aka vernacular) or in any of the “maintenance” languages like English?

Do you see any “danger” that anybody in the team might right-click because of the red squigglies and create false entries for the main spell checker?

Our vernacular has far too many very short words, almost like English, they all look similar: CVC or CV like cim, cɩm, cǝm, cem, cǝŋ, cɛn.

So even without mixing other languages in, it is rather dangerous for typos, because you make a typo and often the spell checker cannot warn you because that wrong word is also a valid entry. That is why my eyebrows went up, when I noticed this unexpected behaviour for \rem (and there might be other fields concerned).

I do not think, there is immediate need for action. Maybe this just needs to be documented.

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We use the \rem marker in the vernacular. Since they’re English words, I think our translators know not to try and spell check them, so we haven’t seen much danger of teams spell checking those words. Even if they did, I don’t think it would cause issues with the way we’re handling linguistic checking. I can see how it could be more of an issue with many short words.

I think a useful feature in Paratext would be a guide to the various style markers. I’m sure there are many places to find that information, but it would be ideal if we could have a button in the top ‘style’ box where we could get a little explanation for the particular marker that is being used. It could also have this sort of information, informing the user of any relevant issue with the given marker.

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Stephen+Katt:

I think a useful feature in Paratext would be a guide to the various style markers.

+1

Today I was looking how to do the superscript for ordinal numbers. Started reading the official USFM reference. Found nothing. Then looked into our project usfm_custom.sty and found an existing marker \ord. I was very happy, not having expected a ready-made solution.

I get the fact that it is best to keep “data” and “rendering” appart. But for a user who cannot memorize all those markers it would be helpful to have a summary of “what is this marker” and “how is it being applied” and “where can I (legally) use this”.

Answer 2

Note to self, found the below new (to me) website in this thread:

[Link Removed]

https://ubsicap.github.io/usfm/identification/index.html?highlight=rem#rem