Correct usage of the \ft marker

Question

I just discovered that many… probably around 200… footnotes in one of our projects didn’t include a footnote text \ft marker. In almost all cases the text area of the footnote started with some other marker like \xt or a project coded \xgrk to encode Greek text.

Because of these other markers, the footnotes hadn’t been failing any of the Marker checks I had been running.

One of my questions is: Is there ever a situation when you would have a footnote without the \ft marker?
I discovered this problem because the footnotes weren’t printing in PrintDraft, so I suspect the \ft is obligatory.

Other question: Should PT give a Marker error when something like \ft \zgrk… is written (it currently says “empty ft marker”)?
If not, is there another way to encode a footnote which starts with a Greek word?

Finally, If \ft is obligatory, shouldn’t the PT Marker check have caught the problem?

Answer 1

For footnotes \ft is not obligatory. \f + \fr c.v Is obligatory with the + sign replaceable with another choice and c.v being the chapter and verse. Of course you can have c:v instead.

After that you can have any of a number of footnote markers including but not limited to \ft \xt \fk \fq and \fqa . It must end with \f*

Check out the write-up on usfm markup available on the paratext website. I’d give you the link if I wasn’t on my phone.

Normally you can switch from one character style in a footnote to another without closing but some work better if you close them. When you close one, the style reverts to the previous style. You can also nest markers in a footnote. Search for needing in the
paratext help menu.

Blessings Shegnada