How to export plain text?

Question

According to my old notes, I get the cleanest text via copy and paste, with my “View Setting” set to “unformatted”.

I need from PT8 entire chapters in plain text, UTF-8 with clean, original SFM (or USFM if you want) for post-processing with another tool.

I works mostly, but I get typical output like this, see the \p marker:

\c 2\zblo 7974\s1 Marii a ŋʊm Yeesu\p\v 1 Kaŋkǝlǝ́ nɖe na bʊtǝnyarɩ 'baya Ogʊsto a shee ganɔ wàà, ba tʊ̂r bʊtǝna mbʊɖee Room kǝbaja ba jɩ ma, kǝbɛrɛ baŋunii.\v 2 Ŋkǝlǝ́ nɖee ba lee ʊrɩtʊr ʊsǝbaka ɖe ma, Kiriniyɔsɩ a lee ka Nɖiyar ashee Sirii kaatǝna.

Can you see how my paragraph markers never carry any “closing space”. I believe this is against the definition of proper SFM data. I looked it up again in usfmReference2_4.pdf:

SFMs start with a backslash character “” and end with the next space.

For my other tool, working also with Regexes, it would be very very helpful if I could properly define each SFM as “backslash whatever closing-space”.

Please advise for the best way to get clean text with valid markers out of PT8.

Answer 1

I would think that your cleanest text would come directly from the text file that Paratext uses.

Comments

Thanks anon848905, I could never do this in Fieldworks/Flex, but I just had a look at the project data: Yes, I can copy chunks as needed from the raw data. For example I can easily grab one chapter at a time and “harvest” a book and be even faster then I would be when navigating inside PT8.

And yes, I promise, I will only work from copies… It is just too tempting to do cut and paste rather than copy and paste - because I can see what I have grabbed already. And just too routine to hit, YES, when closing the file and the editor goes “You have unsaved changes…”.

So thread closed, user happy. Thank you.