Making a verse-list from project notes [solved]

Question

In my understanding, it is not advised to enter project notes into the actual scripture text with SFM like \rem. I understand the best way is to use the project notes provided by PT.

Now we have this need: One team member went through a book and created 139 special notes (all tagged !!bkt) for issues arising from the back translation. Of course we can easily filter for those 139 notes.

The notes themselves are not important though; the text portions (verses) that are referenced are: We now need a list of those 139 verses of the text. So that we can display, export or PDF-print those for another step in our work-flow. (We have volunteers, who are not in the office and not on PT.)

When I do a “Basic Search” for text in PT, I have an option to tick “Results List”, List Operation: “Create List”. I like this. Now I need similar functionality from our filtered notes, please.

I am not afraid of advanced tools or anything that lets me filter verses with reference to notes for the verse. I have a deep hunch that something like this must already exist, because notes that are “apart” from the text they reference would be rather limited.

If we find that after all, this feature does not exist, I would like to learn how best to place \rem temporary (custom) tags \rem* into the text for issues that will be treated within a few weeks and will then be considered fully resolved.

Answer 1

It looks like from a Notes List window, once you have set up the appropriate filter you can select the option to print, and then print it to pdf. That might be sufficient if all you need is the content of the note with the selected text. However if you want more flexibility, again from the hamburger menu in the Notes List window you can select “Copy all notes”. If you paste that in a text editor that should give you the flexibility you need, and if you just want the verse references you could presumably use regexes to get just those.
anon297911

Comments

Thank you for the first answer. Maybe I was unclear?

We do not need to print or export the notes; we need the text of the concerned verses which need re-working.

Actually you might have a valuable step for a solution: I just did extract the list of references from our 139 notes, with a simple ^LUK (\d|:)+

Looks like this:

LUK 1:8
LUK 1:22
LUK 2:13
LUK 2:44
LUK 3:11

Is there a way in PT9 to have a list (maybe a text file) of references and show the respective verses?

I tried to quickly reverse-engineer that from the PT inbuilt lists: created a list from a search like dummy.ref and had a look inside: This is simple XML, with VerseRef but also with more information like SelectedText and StartPosition which I do not have of course. Tried to edit some stuff out, in preparation to possibly splice my own references in; but PT made my CPU fan rev up and then crashed.

This feels too hacky for the normal work-flow of getting text out to some volunteers. So I rather repeat this new sub-question:

Is there a way in PT9 to have a list of references and show the respective verses?

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Does this work for you?

• Do a search to generate a Paratext list.
• Make sure you have un-ticked show verse context.
• In the list’s menu, choose “Print Texts in List”.
• This will print the full verses in the list, and you can choose to print to PDF if that is helpful.

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You’re nearly there with your list creation. You don’t need a hacked XML file though. When you have your list of 139 references, do the following:

1. Save those as a plain text file with one verse reference per line.
2. In the Results List window’s hamburger menu, choose List > Open list...
3. In the Open dialog, locate the file-type dropdown just above the the Open and Cancel buttons and select Text lists (*.txt) as the file type.
4. Locate your text file and open it up.

You should now see a clickable list of all the references in the Results List window.

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This answer has helped us indeed to have a valid “list” in PT to see all references, and to go to each one, by simple click. Thank you very much for the hint, that the list window can also open simple well formatted text-files.

It has not helped me though, to export the actual scripture text for such search-results-list. For that I just invented my own quick hack:

• copy the entire scripture text (one book or more) into a text editor
• replace all the SFM for \v with a full reference for each verse (with a script or “do not ask”), for example replace \v 13 by LUK 12:13
• now run a regex over this properly referenced text and find all needed verses, the regex is very long for 139 references but rather primitive:

^(LUK 1:8 |LUK 1:22 |LUK 2:13 | (plenty ommited here...) |LUK 24:33 |LUK 24:35 |LUK 24:37 |LUK 24:41 ).*$

• now use the text editor to “copy all matches” and you have a file with all the verse content of all needed verses, to pass to volunteers (for example as printout) to help them do their part in the workflow.

I could have done it manually in the same time, but I would never know, if I missed a few because I get drowsy, when I have to do repetitive jobs more than three times like “jump to reference”, “copy”, “jump to target document”, “paste”, “jump back to PT”.

I am very happy. The only step that is not automatic yet is the script that turns SFM for each verse into a full self-contained reference. There was not time today, but I can do that next time. It is a simple loop of one regex for each chapter (I am writing this here as notes to self), like this:
(?<=\\c (18).*?)\\v (?=.*?\\c 19$)
and replace by this:
LUK ${1}:
(and make is more wonderful if several books are treated at once)

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I was exited to see your answer, thank you. But when I “side-load” a list of references from a text-file (remember, they are not originating from a search but from a number of filtered PT-notes), then the option to “Print Texts in List” is sadly greyed out.

You can see my hack above, how I did it myself. But I would like to learn more about Print Texts in List, because that is what we will need again and again for our workflow.

All is well, I figured it out, duh: I side-load my list of references from a text-file. Then I save it as a “proper” list of references in PT style with the command “Save List as References”. Then I open that “better” list again (which gives me several hundred bad ghost entries which I will figure out another day, no worries) and then I can print to PDF - and extract the text easily.

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Good work figuring that out. That was quite the procedure!