Find Similar Words - follow verse filter

Question

Is there any way to get the “Find Similar Words” tool in the Wordlist to only look at the range of books specified in the verses filter? I’m working with a project that contains the NT plus Psalms, but we are only interested in the NT right now. We know that Psalms has not yet been standardized. I set the range to Mat-Rev, but the tool is still showing places where Psalms has a different spelling. These are shown in grey, so it’s possible to simply skip over them, but it’s quite distracting and there are quite a few, since Psalms is a big book. Am I doing something wrong, or is this a feature?

Answer 1

@marvinson, If I recall, it does actually do filtering (you can see the count of items change when changing the filters). What you are seeing (and is by-design) is that it shows words that appear in your filter that may be misspelled when compared to similar words that appear in other books (even outside your filter). Similar words in those other books show up in gray for that reason.

So, for example, in my test project, when filtering to all books, I have 255 similar words, but when I filter to the current book, that number drops to 75.

All books:

image878×575 41.6 KB

Current book:

image878×575 41.7 KB

Answer 2

I have used the spelling tools quite a bit and believe this is the way the spelling tools work. There is a similar issue with the Parallel passages tool. Both tools present results based on the entire project, even though you are only checking a smaller bit.

To do what you want to do I would try this:

1. Create an Auxiliary project
2. In the Auxiliary project, delete the books you are not working on and want to ignore.
3. Open the Wordlist tool in the Base project and export it as XML.
4. Open the Wordlist tool in the Auxiliary project import the Wordlist XML file.
5. Do your work in the Auxiliary project.
6. From the Auxiliary project, export Wordlist as XML.
7. In the Base project import the XML file.
   Note: Wordlist keeps words that are no longer in the project, so deleting Psalms should not delete words that only occur in Psalms from the project. When you import the corrected word list from the auxiliary project, all the words from Psalms should still be there in the state that they were when you exported it.

Is it worth it? I do not know. Simply fixing the errors in Psalms may be a more efficient option.

Answer 3

This issue seems to have been fixed in PT9. (My original post was written in Aug 2019 with PT8.) The WordList tool now follows the verse filter. Many thanks to the developers!

Answer 4

I spoke too soon. The WordList does follow the verse filter, and it already did that in PT8. But as indicated in the title of this thread, it’s the Find Similar Words tool (within the WordList) that doesn’t follow the verse filter, and it still doesn’t in PT9.

The project where this initially showed up has moved past this stage now, but I tried your suggested solution in another test project to see how it would work. I found that exporting the corrected wordlist from the auxilliary project and importing it into the base project doesn’t change the text of the base project. So it seems the only approach is to either ignore the spurious entries in the word list, or make the corrections also in the books we’re not working with, which largely negates the point of setting the verse filter.

Of course, another approach would be, after making the corrections in the auxilliary project, import all the NT books back into the base project. But that’s too dangerous for my liking – you would have to be very sure that no-one has done any work in the base project! So I won’t even suggest it!

Answer 5

@anon291708, Thanks for the explanation. Makes sense.