Typical File Name issue

Question

I believe this may have been asked before, but I wanted to check and see if there have been any changes to this in the last few years.

Two of the projects that we oversee do not use .sfm for their Typical File Name, and instead were setup to use .txt. No one is quite sure why this was done, but here we are.

The person who handles vernacular media for these projects uses some programs which can import .sfm files in order to sync the Paratext text with a smartphone app. Unfortunately, the program she uses will not import the .txt files. So until now, she has had to create a new project with .sfm extensions, and copy the text over in order to import it for the work she is doing.

Is there any way currently to change the Typical File Name? These languages are currently finishing NT translation, so this really is not a big priority, but I wanted to check to see if there is a way to handle this.
Thanks, Stephen+Katt K

Answer 1

I would do a project conversion with a new shortname. The files will be regenerated with the default extension and the history will be preserved.

If it were me, I would try doing a Send/Receive on all computers, deleting all the others except the admin. Edit the settings file to change the file extension, rename all the file extensions, then doing Send/Receive back to the server and have the other projects pull it back down. I’d try it, but couldn’t guarantee it.

Comments

dhigby:

If it were me, I would try doing a Send/Receive on all computers, deleting all the others except the admin. Edit the settings file to change the file extension, rename all the file extensions, then doing Send/Receive back to the server and have the other projects pull it back down. I’d try it, but couldn’t guarantee it.

Do not do this!

It will wipe out your text history (well, technically, Paratext will just be unable to find the files in the history, but same thing to the user ).

EDIT: It’s best if you use Tools > Advanced > Convert Project as @dhigby mentioned. Note that this will result in a new project so you will have to weigh the pros/cons of doing that.
Whoops. As @anon848905 stated below, we never actually added in that functionality into the UI so ignore that comment.

It might be easier to find the developers of the application and get them to fix their application since Paratext allows the user to select any extension for it’s files (well, almost any extension).

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dhigby:

I would do a project conversion with a new shortname. The files will be regenerated with the default extension and the history will be preserved.

Unfortunately, using Convert Project does NOT change the file name (or extension). It does change the project short name. This process does NOT change the TXT to SFM.
So if you have a project named ABC with file names as 041MATABC.TXT; when you convert the project to XYZ the project short name will be changed, but the underlying file name will remain 041MATABC.TXT.

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Please note that as of 2020-03-12 when you convert a project to a new short name, the settings file holds a field called “Name” that continues to hold the original project name. So that if you had an original project called ABC and change it to XYZ, the name setting will read:
ABC.
This field does not get used for much, but if you make a backup of the project and restore it then instead of restoring as the new name of XYZ, it will try to restore as ABC.

This issue has been reported to the developers. PTX-16842