Replacement for ~ for word-medial space

Question

In order for the spell check to work, I had to replace word-medial spaces with a ~. I added the ~ to the word-medial punctuation inventory in the Language Settings. Now the spelling tool works. Words with multiple morphemes now show up in the list. However, I am now getting this error:

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When I remove the ~ from the inventory my word list returns to only single morpheme terms. Now, I am not sure what to do. Any thoughts? I can replace the ~ with an en-dash, a -. However, I’m concerned that will have additional issues, especially when it is time to typeset. Any suggestions?
David

Answer 1

One way to handle this is to use some other unused character in place of the ~. I would suggest that you could use one of the modifier letters that is somewhat unique from other symbols. For instance you might use 02D5 (˕). It is different from a hyphen, but is pretty visible as you read Paratext. You can search in the Character Map tool for “modifier” to find the modifier letters. Add the character to your word-medial punctuation list so that the words will show up in the Wordlist.

You can change this back after you have completed your spelling checks or this can be remove at the time of doing typesetting.

This type of situation is unusual, but not uncommon. Paratext requires that we minimize ambiguity (which is what is occurring with the ~).

Comments

Hi anon848905,
Thanks for your response. I’d prefer not to be adding and removing characters at the time of typesetting. If we need to make slight changes and edits during typesetting, we will need to add the character back in in order to run spell checks to make sure we didn’t introduce other issues. Otherwise, both the spell check and the biblical terms tool would be made void at that point. I’m wondering if there is a way to do this that won’t require inputting and removing the character.

I looked at our character map and it is pretty sparse. It does have hyphen-minus, hyphen, en-dash, and em-dash.

Do you have any additional ideas on how to resolve this?
Thanks anon848905 for your help!
Dave

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Just to add some information that may help your decision, when we modify characters during typesetting, we do NOT need to modify the Paratext files but instead make the change in the process of taking the text from Paratext into Indesign. We do this with a regular expression changes file and it is a common practice for various reasons.

But perhaps an equally important consideration is how the text will appear online. While you can modify the text with a changes file for a Scripture App, other online sites, like YouVersion, will take the files directly from the Digital Bible Library Paratext files. There are work arounds, of course, like having a daughter project with the modifications included uploaded to the DBL instead of the original project. But making sure that the characters are internet compliant and searchable will be important. You might look online and see how related languages have already dealt with the question.