0 votes

In the language we’re working in, there’s a (mostly) obligatory article before proper names, much like in Greek. I.e, ‘Abraam and Sara went’ would need to be:
O Abraam hai i Sara telǎrdǎs
The.M Abraam and the.F Sara went
If we enter key terms with \k o Abraam\k* then this breaks the sort order. If I manually enter the o/i outside the \k...\k* this is worse, because rather than keeping the paragraph together as I hoped, paratext splits the paragraph in two and the article is lost. I imagine that some languages using prefixed honorifics suffer similar problems.

I can think of 3 solutions for the moment, that don’t require manual glossary editing before we get to printing:

  1. Include the article in the keyterm and sort externally. This makes finding things a bit of a pain.
  2. Include the article after the keyterm \k Abraam\k*,o and then write some kind of changes script to recognise and reorder them.
  3. Extend the definition of \k so that it allows a default USFM3.0 attribute, which solves the scripting issues.
    (a) just having the article as an attribute, it could be: \k Abraam|o\k*
    (b) Alternatively, it might be preferable to have \k Printed form |internal representation\k* like with \w, where the internal representation informs linking and the sort order.
    E.g. \k o Abraam|Abraam\k*`

Clearly 3(b) would need some programming effort. I don’t know what option 3 (a) would do to paratext’s internal mechanisms. Would it break the \w linking, etc?

I assume I’m not the first to face this. How have others solved this issue?

Paratext by (294 points)
reshown

1 Answer

0 votes
Best answer

Off the top of my head, have you tried a non-breaking space? In earlier Paratext versions, the representation for that was ~ , so you would have “0~Abram” in Paratext. Most of the exporting software easily replaces this with the Unicode non-breaking space which might be something you might like anyway for all of your Scripture if the readers don’t like the phrase broken across lines. I have not tested it in our latest versions but it seems it would be worth a try. Make sure to put it in your language settings in the other tab as a word medial character. If it doesn’t work already in Paratext, it is a behavior that should be accommodated because of the historical usage and you could put in a bug report.

Blessings,

by (1.3k points)
reshown

So o~\k Abram\k* ? Strangely enough that seems to be working.
I say strange, because when I add a new glossary entry a (space is inserted before the \k and yet still the text stays together.

Eek… Hopefully unconnected, my paratext is now crashing (not responding) when I try to insert a new glossary item :frowning: This is even after a reboot of the virtual machine.

If you put ~ in the word medial characters, can you not use \k o~Abram\k* or is that appear improperly for the reader?

Blessings,

From what I understand, it would sort with “o” rather than “A”, which is not what the user would expect.

Welcome to Support Bible, where you can ask questions and receive answers from other members of the community.
For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.
Matthew 18:20
2,628 questions
5,369 answers
5,045 comments
1,420 users