Can milestone markers (like \ts) be used to style text?

Question

Scenario: Our 3-year project plan includes large portions of Genesis, to be consultant checked, printed, and distributed next year. However, we have already drafted ALL of Genesis. I would like to mark up the text to show at a glance that, for example, GEN 19:30 (including the \s heading above v.30) through to GEN 20:18 (end of chapter) does not need to be checked now [we’ll come back to it in 10 years or so!] and should be excluded from publication.

\ts-s\* ... \ts-e\* seems to provide the markup functionality for this scenario (because it’s non-hierarchical, so it can go anywhere, including in the middle of a chapter, or right before \c). However, I’m wondering whether it’s possible to use custom.sty to give a distinctive style to all the text between \ts-s and \ts-e (make it pink, for example). My understanding of milestone markers is that they are stand-alone markers, so Paratext doesn’t (and shouldn’t) treat text “inside” these markers as being marked in any way. But it’s worth asking.

If \ts can’t be used this way, is there another solution (that doesn’t involve marking every single paragraph in an omitted section).

(I realize that \ts is intended to mark chunks of text to be translated at-a-go, not text to be omitted. But my real question is about milestone markup, not \ts specifically. We could create our own marker in the z-namespace.)

Answer 1

Our project also is only planning to publish certain passages, and this is the way I’m dealing with it. I just put flag notes indicating if something is part of this or not. They’re all over the place.
Are you just interested how to publish only specific passages? I would suggest looking into Bible Modules. I was trying to figure out this kind of difficulty with publication when someone suggested this to me. They are configurable “extra book” files, which can pull text from anywhere in the Bible, even other Bible Modules (as I understand). So, for example, we wanted to do the story of Adam as a separate publication, so I configured a Bible Module to just have Genesis 1-3 plus a few verses in chapter 5. And if I wanted to do the stories of our Bible characters from Genesis, I think I should be able to create other ones for Noah, Abraham, etc. and configure the Bible Module to use each of these other Bible Modules.

Comments

In a Bible Module you can also insert \fig illustrations, so you can have more pictures in a limited publication and not clutter up the main book files with pics not wanted for a “final” publication.

Answer 2

The “correct” maker to use to mark -by verse- text that’s in different stages of readiness is \sts, but this seems to have been semi-deprecated in the recent USFM standard and developments of paratext.
Its basically a comment, but at least in the old USFM 2.3 docs still on line it was suggested that
\sts 1 = draft,
\sts 2 =exegetically checked
\sts 3 =consultant checked
\sts 4=published.

While modules are nice, only having 5 of them available does not suit a micro-publishing approach which starts with, say, 4 portions from Genesis, and nor does the chapter-based progress reporting work when the consultant checked the “Account of Abraham” Gen 11:27-25:11

Comments

anon542642:

While modules are nice, only having 5 of them available does not suit a micro-publishing approach which starts with, say, 4 portions from Genesis

Actually, you can have an unlimited number of modules. You can only have 5 modules open at a given time, but if you go to the Bible Modules selection window you can choose different modules to open in a given book. So, if you are using XXA for modules, you can simply choose to open a different module in XXA by clicking on the Bible Module menu item and selecting a different definition.

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Keep in mind, also, that a module specifies a publication. Your 4 GEN portions, if you’re thinking a single book, should be specified in a single module. You can also specify front matter and intro information for the current publication in the module (the FRT “book” can be used, but it must be customized for each PT-exported publication, and I don’t think there is a way within PT to save intermediate publications’ title, credits, etc information, other than including it as intro material in a Bible Module.