Wordlist opens - on right click - with unexpected ranges

Question

How do I open the Wordlist tool? Helps

To open the Wordlist tool: Click in a project window, to make it the active window. From the Tools menu, select Wordlist.... Optional: From the View menu, do either or both of the following: Select Set Scripture Range, to limit the Wordlist to selected books. Select Always On Top, to keep the Wordlist visible when you click another Paratext window. The Spelling column of the Wordlist displays the status of each word: Undecided, Correct, or Incorrect. :informationicon: See also: [Introd…

Here on this forum I learnt that we can right-click a word in the main window and not only bring up the wordlist but have that word selected at once. Very nifty.

Now in this young project we have all always worked with the complete unfiltered wordlist - because the orthography still is emerging and one needs to keep an eye on the number of occurrences and on (potential wrong) spelling-variations which might be nearby in a wordlist.

Sadly I noticed that I have not understood why and how the wordlist is applying a range-filter when I open it with a right-click. When I do the “normal” call via the tools-menu I never had such unhelpful surprises.

I just did a few tests with just one word and got several openings with a range-filter of two chapters of one book, several with a range-filter of one chapter of that book (where I had jumped from) and later I “got lucky” and the wordlist opened again on “All books”.

I searched help if this could be some “helpful automatic feature” but could not find anything.

This is not a complaint, I am puzzled and a little frustrated that I cannot figure this out. It is not completely random but I am not seeing the pattern. Thank you for your input.

As a bonus I would consider any answers which would help me to configure the right-click-access such that the wordlist would reliably open on “All books” so that I do not need to keep checking every time when jumping a lot between three windows.

Answer 1

Admittedly it’s probably not what anyone would generally want, but from the code, it looks like opening the Wordlist via right-click sets the filter to what it was last time it was opened. Does that seem to be the case?

Comments

Thank you very much for looking into the code. With this information I have done more tests and now I can see the pattern:

• both the right-click access and the tools-menu access seem to using this shared “marker” where they open the word-list the same as it was last, when it was closed (not when it was last openend).

This is a not-at-all bad choice the team has made. It will serve people like us who (normally) always want to see the list unfiltered. And it will also serve other users who mostly want to focus on whatever.

I have not had a chance to test with send/receive but hope that other users filters will not change my display range.

New subject:

I have a suggestion, coming from the few days when we missed the fact that we were not being shown that entire wordlist: In Flex, there is a visual feature, those bright-yellow patches of colour, which tell you at a glimpse whenever something is filtered, choice-based or otherwise limited to less-than-all-items.

For PT8 I am not sure but it seems that the option “All Books” is the showing-all-we-got option for the wordlist. Correct? So my idea would be that the pull-down list-box on top of the wordlist window could show that yellow colour on any item that is “hiding” certain entries.

Supporters might hate this next idea but other users might hate the yellow-patch: If you make this warning about “you are only seeing parts of this” a feature in more of PT8 (key terms, wordlist, basic checks, ) then one could consider an option to turn yellow-warnings off for users who would get migraines.

For now, my question is well answered and I am happy. Thank you again.