Error about invalid punctuation in Glossary [solved]

Question

Working on a Glossary and running basic checks. A lot of helpful errors coming up.

But where we refer in the text to certain chapters like Book 2—5 or certain verses like Book 4.12-14 we get errors. Those should not be errors.

I then go to > Checking > Punctuation Inventory… and the “bad” characters are not even listed under medial.

The long-dash and the hyphen are properly defined in the project Scripture Reference Settings as “Range of Chapters or Books” and “Range of Verses”.

The only “exotic use” we are doing here is that we use those references in actual text, not in a technical “Cross Reference” since those are not working for this project (where many books have not been translated yet). For example:

Ɩ tɩɩ ŋǝ̂ ʊkɛɛshɩɩ ɖe Lefitiki 12—14 nɩ.

The above example means “You can see examples of this in Leviticus chapters 12 to 14”.

So it feels to me that the checking tool is “finding” punctuation in the Glossary, but the inventory tool is somehow ignoring the Glossary.

Or I am overlooking something. Thank you for your input.

Answer 1

Tim,
There are multiple things at work with Scripture References.

1. Any reference that has been marked with markers like \r, \mr, \xt, \ior get checked by the Scripture reference settings. One issue that can be a problem here is that you need to mark references, but the names may sometimes be abbreviated and sometimes written out. The settings only allow one option for \xt (for instance) and so if you mix abbreviations and short names you will have reference errors.
2. Any numbers that are not specifically marked as Scripture references get checked as numbers. When numbers report medial punctuation errors, these errors are based on the number settings.

So, if you have Scripture references, they need to be marked appropriately.

Comments

Thank you @anon848905, you got me on the right track. No more wrong errors in this project.

As I had written, this is not about Scripture References in the technical sense. All we do, we mention in the Glossary, in prose, that people could eventually read more about Mr. XYZ in certain chapters.

So when you sent me to number settings, that did the trick. Since we follow the syntax of the Scripture Reference Settings, we would write 12—16 when we mean chapters. Normally one might write 12 — 16, but we want to help our readers with some consistency.

So PT, not seeing spaces, has (correctly) reported the longer dash in 12—16 as a medial punctuation.

I had not understood the error messages, because “all the stuff that goes with numbers” (like decimal points or plus or minus signs) was in my brain not classified as “punctuation”. Normally when I get punctuation errors, it means there is a first-ever use of a character somewhere in text, so I had forgotten that there are several places where PT collects data for valid characters.

All is well, thread can be closed (I have not yet found where to tick that). I give you one pink heart and say thank you.