Keeping notes on the project as a whole {metadata, record keeping, recording policies}

Question

Continuing the discussion from Which of two windows will PT choose?:

I’d like to hear from other teams as to how you keep records regarding your project. For example, I keep records on:

• Our project’s decisions on best practices;
• Meta data that I copy to the start of every Bible book;
• Research on spelling and punctuation standards for our language, and our decisions as to our “house style” for spelling/punctuation;
• A history of the different text segments we’ve used for copyright statements;
• [more below, if you’re interested!]

I want to keep records in the project fileset, so that the project is kept together, and so that these records are also backed up to the S/R server. So I have made the decision to put these records in the “Extra F” (XXF) book in the project.

But is there a better way? Please tell me what you do. I think that there should be a PT feature for recording these, and I’m intending to put in a feature request.

There are certainly problems with my approach: I’d like these records to be separate from the Bible translation itself; and, since I keep the records in English, every word is underlined as a spelling mistake, and hundreds of English words are unnecessarily added to the Wordlist.

For those who are interested, here are some more things I document:

• A history of the disclaimer texts we’ve used for:
  • non-consultant checked books that we release in order to get feedback;
  • consultant checked books, in order to clarify that they nevertheless may be revised in future;
• A record of various pieces of text used in the About box in apps, programs and Web publications of our project, and in any other information boxes in the same publications;
• A copy of footers I’ve used in Print Draft;
• Standard text segments to use in:
  • Marked Points in the Project History (e.g. “Before doing replace with RegEx_Pal tool.”, “Replaced with RegEx_Pal tool: [find] —> [replace] .”
  • Notes;
  • Biblical Terms history of the renderings of a term;
• Standards we use for morphologising;

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Answer 1

wdavidhj:

There are certainly problems with my approach: I’d like these records to be separate from the Bible translation itself; and, since I keep the records in English, every word is underlined as a spelling mistake, and hundreds of English words are unnecessarily added to the Wordlist.

I don’t know if it meets your needs, but any files inside the “shared” folder of a project will be S/R regardless of what it is. You could create a file that contains that information and put it in there.

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Comments

Yes, maybe that’s what I should do. If, in future, PT included a menu item to view that folder, this would give a quick and integrated way to access documents there.

A Word document would be more suited to the text of my notes, though I like seeing those notes alongside my Bible window in the main PT window.

I noticed just today, as it happens, that copying between PT and Word is not without problems: I ended up with this in my Word doc:

'

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I’ve just discovered that PT has an issue with filenames in this folder that contain Unicode characters. I hope that these will be allowed in future versions.

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No, sorry, this is a restriction from our third-party backend (Mercurial). Unicode characters are not allowed in file names that will be S/R’d.

EDIT: For a little more clarification: Unicode characters can create problems with Mercurial and we have chosen to not allow file names that contain Unicode characters to keep these problems from creating issues with S/R in Paratext. It is unlikely that this will change in the near future.

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