\io1 marker "unknown" if followed by numeral

Question

An RTL project numbers the main points of the outline in the book intro. Some books have subpoints marked with \io2, so the main points are marked with \io1, per recommendation in USFM Reference.

But Paratext does not recognize \io1 as a valid marker when followed by a numeral.

Interestingly:

• It does not object to numerals following \io or \io2
• It recognizes \io1 followed by a numeral in an LTR transliterated project based on this one

As a solution, we can either remove the numerals from the outline or use \io instead of \io1. But why should a numeral following \io1 be invalid? USFM 3.0 makes no comment about this.

Answer 1

The problem may be an invisible Right-to-Left RTL (u+200F) marker attached to the \io1 marker. That would cause PT not to recognize it as valid.
Background
Paratext automatically adds RTL in verse reference sequences to make them appear correctly in RTL text. For example if you type 12:13-14 two invisible RTL markers will automatically be added: 12<RTL>:13<RTL>-14 so that in the RTL display you see this: 14-13:12. It can happen that when we edit RTL text, this automatic feature leaves stray RTL characters attached to numbers and they can be difficult to delete. For example \io<RTL>1 or \io1<RTL>
Solution
Try retyping a fresh \io1 marker plus the number after it. If that does not give an error then you know you have an issue with the RTL markers. You can then use regular expressions to replace the corrupted markers with good ones.
Tip: I recommend using Uniview UniView 14 to examine RTL text for invisible characters.

Comments

Tried UniView 14: cool tool!

Yes, there are RLM’s, apparently automatically inserted by Paratext, and then rejected by the same.

I tried retyping fresh markers, and still get errors. Also tried deleting the RLM’s w RegEx Pal and Paratext puts them back in.

But it only inserts them when there is a number in the SFM, i.e. \io1 and \io2 followed by a digit. I don’t get any errors after a plain \io

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What if you paste the whole sfm with some text included from a text file as in:

“\io1 text” ?

Alternately, for output which has automatic numbering capability like InDesign and/or Word, etc., you can define the style in your output program to be a numbered paragraph. Automatically numbered paragraphs will look much nicer in your output anyway than manually numbered ones right out of the box. Of course, you should use a different style for unnumbered paragraphs. This will be easy for your typesetter to do, but you should put a Paratext note requesting the modification.

Blessings,

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It’s too smart Still puts in the RLM.

Before we request any modifications, I should first verify that the numbers are important enough to justify the effort to preserve them.

But assuming people really prefer the outline to have numbers, is there any drawback to using plain \io?

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DVM:

But assuming people really prefer the outline to have numbers, is there any drawback to using plain \io?

According to the USFM standard \io and \io1 are equivalent. Normally \io1 should be used if there are other numbered \io markers. However, I don’t believe that anything would break if you used \io and \io2.

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Thank you, anon848905!

Answer 2

Just an update on this issue in case this is helpful to anyone:

I found a way to ‘sneak up on it’ to insert \io1 in front of a numeral without it being rejected: I insert a new \io1 marker in the line above the red one, and then use the delete key to remove the old marker. But I have to be careful not to remove the space before the numeral. The resulting sequence that Paratext accepts is:

But it does not accept this sequence if I type it after the \io1 marker; only if I insert the new marker a line above the existing text and then remove the intervening marker.

I have found the same behavior with \toc2 and \toc3 markers when the book name begins with a numeral.

Finally, some markers that are red in the Paratext project window do not show up when I run “Basic Checks” looking for Markers. But perhaps that is a subject for a separate post…