Smart Caps in Paratext

Question

Hi All

Does any one can tell me whether there is Smart Caps option in Paratext for Roman letters? The first letter of the word will be Large capital and the rest will be capitals as we can see in Psalms 23:1 “LORD” [paratext NIV11 and NIV84].
If Yes, how can I get it Smart Caps in Paratext?

thanks in Advance

Answer 1

In the NIV11, the word Lord is typed with a capital L and lowercase ord. When the markers \sc…\sc* or \nd…\nd* (which then become capital to display as \ND…\ND*) are applied the word LORD is made into a capital L with Small Cap ORD. So, if you mark a word with \sc…\sc* or \nd…\nd* and the small cap attribute is turned on, any lowercase letter will be displayed as small cap and any uppercase letter will remain full uppercase.

Comments

Thanks anon848905 for the valuable inputs.

for me \sc…\sc* works well as you said, where as \nd…\nd* doesn’t make any changes in the text. see the image

Thank you for the input

blessings

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You are making a common mistake here. You are thinking only about what impact your formatting has on what you see in Paratext. But Paratext is your tool, not your outcome. Think of formatting as labels that identify your text or handles that allow you to grab and do what you want with specific types of text. Paratext is quite limited in its ability to show you what the formatting will or can actually look like. It is not meant to do more than differentiate.

\sc … \sc*, for example is formatting that does not identify the type of text it is handling. It is direct formatting and so can be used for a mixed type of data. And it does usually get all the way through to your publication as small caps.

\nd…\nd* is formatting that specifically identifies your data as a name of Deity. You should only use it for its intended purpose. For example, you would not want to use it for the sign on the cross (unless you used it only for God’s name on the sign) or for mene, mene, tekel, upharsin…

For either, in your output software you will define exactly the format you wish for the marked up text. Small, Caps, Bold, Italicized, Underlined, Colored Red, some or all of the above in fact.

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Hi Shegnada

thanks for the warning…
Yes, you are right that what I think, presently is the impact of what I see in the Paratext.
This was a question asked by a language facilitator from our entity. They have a long word for God and she saw that NIV used a small caps function for LORD referring God in OT. She wanted to try the same small caps in her project too. So I asked this question.
I wanted to suggest using \nd…\nd* as used in the NIV for the LORD. But in our text it is not really showing the deference (see the picture above)
So, my recommendation would be using \sc…\sc* for the time being, so that they can view the desired result in Paratext (they are not using the same \sc…\sc* for any other purpose in their project). Towards the Typesetting and Publishing time we can easily replace the \sc…\sc* to \nd…\nd*

I wonder why Paratext displays \nd…\nd* as Small Caps as in NIV but not in our projects.
is there anything we can change in the custom style? I tried installing the same font of NIV11 but of no way.

Blessings

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binoy:

I wonder why Paratext displays \nd…\nd* as Small Caps as in NIV but not in our projects.
is there anything we can change in the custom style? I tried installing the same font of NIV11 but of no way.

My guess is that the NIV has applied a custom style (custom.sty) to make the \nd marker be small cap. The custom style file can be used to change the format for a marker - you can read more about this in the help files by searching for custom stylesheet.

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Check what stylesheet you are using for that project. This is in Project Properties/Advanced Tab. I see that in usfm.sty, under \Marker sc, there is a line:

\Smallcaps

You should be using the standard usfm.sty stylesheet for your projects and putting anything different in custom.sty. It should be version 2.502 for Paratext 8 installs and version 3.0.0 for Paratext 9 installs, both have the smallcaps attribute for \sc.

Answer 2

I can confirm that the NIV uses a custom sytle sheet (custom.sty), since I am the person who developed it. We use it to change a number of different markers to conform the Paratext NIV display to be as close as possible to a printed NIV.
The most significant changes from the standard style sheet are

• \nd …\nd* formatted as Small Caps
• headings formatted as left aligned and italic

To do these things you will need to add a custom style sheet with the following text:

\Marker nd
\Regular
\SmallCaps

\Marker s1
\Justification left
\Regular
\Italic

\Marker s2
\FontSize 11
\Justification left
\Regular
\Italic