Glossary, Alphabetical Order, and Language Settings

Question

We found a problem in the Glossary of a NT which was about to be printed.

This language contains the digraph vh. The letters ‘v’ and ‘h’ are rare otherwise, but do also occur. Since the glossary automatically sorts entries alphabetically, it actually rearranged the entries in an undesirable way.

All entries which begin with avha- are ordered before entries containing aVha-. (This capitalization is required for certain proper nouns). So a word like Avhafinjile is ordered before a word like AVhafalisaayi, but we actually expect the opposite (-fa- before -fi). Presumably Paratext is ordering AVhafalisaayi as a+v+h rather than a+vh. Ideally, Paratext could recognize ‘Vh’ as a capitalized form of ‘vh’. It is just unfortunate that Paratext does recognize ‘vh’ as a digraph, but only when it is not capitalized.

Is this simply a limitation of the Glossary’s sorting behavior, the language settings, or just a result of the unconventional capitalization?

The language settings Guide suggests that one should not include a capitalized form of multigraphs. Is that always true, or would it actually be possible/desirable to have the ability to include a capitalized form of the digraph (Vh)?

I’m interested to hear:

1. Is there something we can do to get Paratext to sort these as desired?
2. Is there some feature/change request I should make here?
3. Any other suggestions?

Thanks,
Stephen+Katt K

Answer 1

What is the sort order you have for this language? Look on the Alphabetic Characters tab of the Language Settings for the language.

Comments

Initially, ‘vh’ was listed as variant of ‘v’. My initial thought was that this ought be changed so that 'vh occurs as its own character, but I can’t see any change from this since I can’t figure out when the re-alphabatizing of the Glossary occurs. That is, I can’t seem to induce the entries to reorder, even when changing the order of various Alphabetical Characters.

---

After some more experimentation, it does look like moving ‘vh’ to its own line in the Language Settings > Alphabetical Characters has resolved the issue.

One difficulty was getting the Glossary to re-alphabatize itself, as this did not happen automatically after changing language settings, or making changes to the text, etc. The only way I could find to force it to happen was to move to a different book, close the window, link a Biblical Term to a glossary term (in the Biblical Terms tool) and then re-open the project, then move to the GLO.

Is there a simpler way to induce GLO to re-alphabatize the entries?

---

Would you be able to use “Send feedback” to send this to the Paratext team? It seems that changing the order of Alphabetical Characters should also kick off a Glossary re-order.

james_post

---

Sure, I’ll do “Send feedback”.