Book portions in the project plan

Question

A user working on a project that is doing portions of Old Testament books (roughly 40% of the OT) and requested how to set up the project plan to only include those chapters. Paratext does not yet have a way to do this in the book selection tab for the project properties, but I think it is possible to do a workaround within the project plan.

I created a test project using the SIL Compact Plan. I added a task to the beginning of stage 1 called “Selection”, and i made sure the Exegesis task (formerly the first task in the stage) was set to begin when previous task was complete. Then in Assignments and Progress I marked as completed for the Selection task the chapters to be included. I found that subsequent tasks could be simply marked as all complete by clicking the box for All chapters, and that only marked the desired chapters as complete. I could use the + and - buttons to start marking chapters in numerical order as complete, and it would skip over the unselected chapters. Or one could bring up the list of chapters to indicate nonsequential progress, and the non-selected chapters would be grayed out, and Paratext wouldn’t accept a check there if someone clicked the wrong box.

One other issue, the book could not advance out of stage 1 because the chapter/verse check would report issues for all the empty chapters. (Either “verses missing” or “empty verses” depending on whether there were verse number markers present) But if I brought up the list of issues and denied all the “verses missing” or “empty verses” reports, then the automatic check reported no errors and I could mark stage 1 as complete and advance to the next stage.

Answer 1

Based on a conversation with a representative from Progress.Bible, an issue with this is that it does not accurately reflect progress done in the reports that the review. They assume complete chapters of complete books with a certain average number of verses for each chapter in given book.

The work around described might work for a Paratext project where there is a savvy admin or team member, but many teams would not be able to do this on their own.

anon307241

Comments

So is there more to the need than just enabling a simpler way to do it in Paratext?
If you could (for example) Shift click a book in the Books tab and select the chapters you wanted to include, would that then skew the statistics ?

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Yes. I simpler way is needed. Many programs in the Pacific do portions (OT panoramas or denominational annual reading calendars).

It would probably still skew the statistics.This is probably inevitable when we try to meet the needs of our translation programs and the desires of funders at the same time.

anon307241

Answer 2

Amen! More Flexibility is needed now that the basic system is working for the median type of project.