Detached notes are difficult to work with

Question

I am interested in what others say about what I consider a flaw in the Paratext handling of notes.I have sent my contribution as a bug report and suggestion for improvement, but I am not getting a hearing. I am told that the program does what it is designed to do That is fine, but my point is that this design is unhelpful for the users.

When a note is attached to a word, and that word is then deleted or substituted with another word, the note loses its anchor and is moved to another instance of the same word or if such a word is not found, then to the beginning of the verse. I see no rationale for this behavior. Does anyone see this as a good way to do it?

It is not too bad when I am working in a Bible book with verses, but if I am in an extra book like XXA where I have six Easy Readers based on the Bible, there are no verses. I have given each story its own chapter and added verse numbers for each section/paragraph. Those verses are only added in order to alleviate the erratic behaviour of the floating notes and will have to be removed later.

If there are many notes, I may see a dozen notes in a row at the verse number and it is very difficult to figure out where they came from. I usually have to take a word from the context saved inside the note, do a search, find the correct context and double click on that hit. I shall try to attach a screen shot to illustrate this.

Now, the problem could be solved easily, if the program was changed to attach the note to the preceding word instead of the current two options. In this way, the note is tied to its context and it would be easy to handle the note. If I wanted to, I could also easily re-attach it to the new word, in case I was not satisfied with that new word.

2020-10-291280×720 180 KB

Answer 1

I’m guessing the reason that Paratext was not designed to do what you suggest is that Paratext might have to go back pretty far to find a preceding context to attach the note to, which could potentially be very confusing in its own way. I agree that most of the time, having the note near its original location is ideal, but if the verse changes significantly, then it is almost more helpful to put it at the start of the verse so people know it is unattached. [Except in Extra books, see below]

Related issue 1: I think that one thing that they want to avoid is having huge contexts within the notes file, since this bloats the file sizes and can cause issues with send/receive. In our area we had some projects where there were hundreds of notes in the Extra books (without verse numbers), and I believe that the notes file includes the text of that whole verse, so it included the entire text of the chapter in every note file which led to huge project sizes (Correct me if I’m wrong).

Related issue 2: Your experience with Extra books is similar to mine. To avoid the weird note issues you mentioned, we have to add in chapter and verse numbers, which are usually arbitrary. But if we do, the Interlinearizer does not work properly for back translation. Only the first verse is shown with no way to approve other verses. The current implementation of the Extra books simply isn’t great for notes or for any of the tasks you would use the Interlinearizer for.

Comments

Thank you for that information.
Concerning the first paragraph, I do not see that as a problem. We rarely completely change a whole verse or line, and even if we did, going to the nearest unchanged word may not cross a verse boundary. If it did so, then the note could be at that verse number.
I did not consider your issue 1, which I can see could be a challenge.
For now, I agree that the only work-around is to add chapters and verses. The Easy Readers I am working on right now uses \q markers, and if the note could be attached to one of those, the problem would be solved. Alternatively, a special marker like \note could be implemented and inserted. It might even be inserted automatically after a given number of words. It is much easier for me to later delete all markes called \note (or whatever) than markers that consist of a letter (c of v) and a number. (I am not familiar with RegEdit.)

Answer 2

I always recommend that a note be attached to a phrase and not a single word. Paratext does a really good job of analyzing the context and reattaching the note to the appropriate context if you do that. But if you attach it to a single word, the biggest danger there is that if that word gets deleted, the note could reattach to the same word in a different part of the verse. But the note probably did not apply to that instance of the word. So always attach notes to phrases is what I do and encourage my teammates to do.

Comments

Thanks for the work-around advice. The problem is that this is counter-intuitive. It would be good to be able to select a clause if the comment refers to a clause, a phrase if it refers to a phrase and a word if it refers to a word. So, I am still hoping the program will be fixed to attach the note to the preceding word in case it was attached to a word that got lost.