Settings and Inventories

Question

In PT9, there are an increasing number of project settings in the Project menu, separated from inventories in the Tools menu (by no apparent logic - presumably mostly for historical reasons). But there are awkward clashes when one wants to use, for example:

• , or . as a thousands separator and a chapter-verse separator
• ’ as word-medial punctuation and a quotation mark and a thousands separator
• both : and . as chapter-verse separators in a multilingual document (One can have characters from many different languages in the character inventory, so why can’t one have multiple types of c-v separators, multiple types of first-level quotation markers etc.?)
  (These are just some very common cases in European languages, not to speak of the rest of the world!)

These produce errors in Run basic checks, which one can of course deny or ignore, but they prohibit Export to pdf, and presumably uploading to the DBL too.

Is there a way round all this?

Answer 1

AWR:

In PT9, there are an increasing number of project settings in the Project menu, separated from inventories in the Tools menu (by no apparent logic - presumably mostly for historical reasons)

Both you, anon848905 and Shegnada are correct here. anon848905’s logic about “what’s allowed” and “what’s found” is right. AWR is also right - this isn’t particularly obvious.

Future plans are that we intend for the association between settings and inventories to made clearer and for Paratext to make it more obvious to teams what settings and inventories they need to complete at different times in their project (at project creation, before drafting, before running checks). There was no time to make those changes in Paratext 9.0 so what we have is very similar to PT8, but with quotation rules and number settings moved.

Shegnada is correct that Paratext is set up for monolingual projects. The way Paratext is a bit bad even for monolingual projects is that within a language some things are not OK in scripture which are OK in introductions and footnotes. For example, it is hard to specify in settings and inventories that it’s alright if someone writes “c.f.: some other place” in a footnote or introduction, but they shouldn’t be able to write “c.f.” in the project text.

• I think teams should be able to specify in settings or inventories, “this is only permitted outside scripture text”.
• I’d like to add an “acronyms and abbreviations” inventory too.

AWR, is your request broader than these two needs? If there is a need to provide a way to check scripture references which are OK in several formats, please write up a feature request. That would make the UI considerably more complicated and might have significant implications for checking. I imagine it would be very easy for two different rules to make it impossible to check text. It’s already easy to set up scripture reference settings in a way which makes it impossible for the check to be reliable.

Comments

Thanks, IanH.

The ‘allowed-found’ really isn’t that obvious, since one can validate characters in the inventories that are not ‘allowed’ in the alphabetic character settings of the project.

The issue came up in the context of Translator’s Handbook authoring, where we of course do many things differently from in a normal Bible project (just look at all the special sfms in HBKENG!). (However, remember that Study Bibles are increasing, and all sorts of other paratextual materials, which will want more flexibility than Paratext currently allows.)

One thing is the recognition of the character ’ (U+2019) as an alphabetic character (sometimes word-initial) as well as as a quotation mark. This is a very old issue – I remember having the problem with a language I worked on over 15 years ago (and we used a ‘canonical’ alphabetic character U+02C8 instead). But now I need it to mark a word-initial alphabetic character in transliterations of Hebrew, and I thought a solution might have been found by now.

Similarly, in paratextual material, we often want to say weird things like: ‘This verse has a 1A-2C-3B-4D-3-z’ structure, and the new number settings don’t allow it. (There may be good reason to be cautious with adding too many new ‘settings’ and restrictions on what’s ‘allowed’.)

Anyway, if I’m the only one with a problem, no worries – we’ll find a workaround. But maybe if others start saying these things, it will have been worthwhile me putting ‘a bug in your ear’.

AWR

---

Unicode has two different characters that are commonly used in place of
U+2019 for an alphabetic-character glottal stop. One is U+02BC Modifier
Letter Apostrophe (ʼ) the other is U+A78C Saltillo (ꞌ). For Hebrew
transliteration I think either of these is preferable to U+02C8, which
is a tone mark, because these are alphabetic characters by default.

Is this what you’re looking for, AWR?

KimB
Pacific Area Language Technology Coordinator
SIL International
Language Technology Consultant (LSS)
SIL Papua New Guinea

---

Thanks, KimB. Yes, sure, we can use another character. But really I was just giving this as an example of a dual use of a character that I would think Paratext should be able to handle, or at least give the option to use in two ways. I’m wondering if ‘what’s allowed’ and ‘what’s valid’ may be tending in the direction of too many constraints.

Answer 2

Paratext is not set up to accommodate a multilingual document. You can, of course, introduce text from a second language, normally in footnotes or extra materials, but it assumes and checks a structure for only one language. That said, I wouldn’t expect any
of those errors you list to prohibit export to PDF or even the DBL unless they were found in the marker or chapter/verse checks. I haven’t checked up on it specifically in paratext 9, but I would report it as an error if it failed to export to PDF… It could
certainly make it through to InDesign. It might possibly fail to get up to the DBL if you misseed full stops and colons in the \xo and \fr lines because those are structure markers.

Blessings Shegnada

Answer 3

AWR:

n PT9, there are an increasing number of project settings in the Project menu, separated from inventories in the Tools menu

I believe the logic here is that there are items that we configure to tell Paratext what should happen (Language, References, Quotation Marks, and Numbers). These are all under the configuration settings. Then there are other items that are simply telling the user what Paratext is finding. These are under the inventories.