Obligatory article before names in glossary

Question

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?

Answer 1

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,

Comments

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 This is even after a reboot of the virtual machine.

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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,

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