Chapter 0 for Introductions

Question

Has there been discussion of making book introductions part of a “Chapter 0” section of the book? The reason I ask is that we have extremely long introductions and it makes using Chapter 1 unwieldy. In fact, in a number of books we can’t make any edits in chapter 1 because it takes too many resources and I’ve ended up temporarily moving the introductions into one of the Bible Modules sections for storage.

I’ll probably send the developers a feature request, but I faintly remember this being discussed and rejected for some reason, so I thought I’d ask before sending in a request.

Answer 1

It would be hard to change the behavior of Paratext so that intro were always chapter 0 because for a lot of people that would make it look like the intro had just disappeared. Hopefully, we can just fix Paratext so that these intro are in fact editable.

Comments

I came here by chance, trying to help someone with introductions behaviour.

Last week I was working on a scripture-related book in book-code XXC. I created a chapter 0, because I am a Python user and because it helped me relate the PT-structure to the book-pages out there. This worked fine for a while and after several minutes, PT (without any warning our double-checking) yanked chapter 0 away and re-numbered everything one chapter up, so my chapter 0 ended up as chapter 1 and all our work-notes where piled up in one useless lump before the beginning of our text.

Seems that you know something more about chapter-0-behaviour, because you write “…would make it look … had just disappeared”. Can you please point me to the documentation. And maybe we need a warning somewhere for all other users, or maybe a separate thread for “structure options (or not) in the XXA … range of books”.

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I continue to insist that this is a much needed improvement to PT. Numerous team members and consultants have also talked to me about this exact issue. I’ve filed a bug report but it seems to be low priority.

Note that this wouldn’t affect the underlying structure of the .sfm files at all. The only thing I envision is that when PT reads the .sfm file, it places anything that occurs prior to the \c 1 line into a prior page, which could be navigated to by typing 0 into the chapter dropdown menu.

Yes, this would include the \id and \toc markers and probably all the \mt lines, along with the entire introduction. And yes, it might confuse people for a very short period. I guess the change would have to be accompanied by a brief explanation. But I think the basic idea is extremely intuitive and would be very rapidly adopted.

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Note that an accompanying advantage would be that it would be somewhat easier to find flags in the introductions, and hopefully they would not simply jump to the top of the text every time the text was edited. It would actually be nice if each paragraph in the “chapter 0” section were treated similarly to verses with regards to the Mercurial versioning system.

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I try not to use words like insist too much, because I perceive us in a position of receiving PT as an amazing gift to our work. But I give you my solid +1 for the way you summarize so well the benefits of such an extra frontal- or admin-chapter.

I was just naively messing around and making such chapter 0, because I had a certain specific need, and then got surprised when it vanished. Zero is a valid number, not just for Python users.

Still we need to hear from the developers, because to me as a power user it sounds as easily implemented. But it touches the structure and so could have implications that we cannot see.

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Tim:

Still we need to hear from the developers, because to me as a power user it sounds as easily implemented.

I’ll try give an explanation as to why this is not quite as simple as people expect.

Inside Paratext itself, this would be a fair bit of work - requiring many places in the code to be updated to the new behavior. For the most part, the changes would be straightforward, but would require touching many different parts of the code (checks, notes, navigation, view layout, saving, etc.). The only thing keeping us from doing this is probably the time and the priority level (i.e. is it worth the time to do it when it means pushing off other work?).

But the biggest problem is everything that is not Paratext that depends on this behavior. Our users may not realize it, but the low-level Paratext code is shared by other applications (Mostly developed by SIL. e.g. PTLite, FLEx, HearThis, Glyssen, etc.) to allow them to read and process Paratext project data.
We could probably avoid changing the low-level code and not affect other applications, but this would probably result in more of a hack in the Paratext code than a good long-term solution. Barring the hack approach, some (or all) of those applications would also have to be updated to handle the new data processing approach.

Answer 2

mnjames:

In fact, in a number of books we can’t make any edits in chapter 1 because it takes too many resources…

Can you clarify what you mean by this? Do you mean that it runs really slowly so typing is difficult or that the computer runs out of resources like memory?

Also, can you tell us which project this is so we can test it (if you can tell us).

Answer 3

Within my organization, Biblica, we use \ie to distinguish pre-Chapter one material. An added complication is that not only the Introduction, but the Book Title occurs in Chapter “0”. We have an understanding with YouVersion that everything from \imt to \ie is to be put in the Introduction Chapter.

That of course does not solve the issue of long Intros slowing down PT. Such Introductions would, I think, be rare since basic translations rarely have Introductions longer than a page. A long introduction is more likely to occur in a Study Bible edition. If that is the case, a Paratext 9.2 Study Bible Additions project may be the solution you need. (Paratext 9.2 is due out in a few months.) You would put a short introduction in your basic text and then use an Additions project to replace the short Intro with a longer Intro.