It is with great joy we announce to you the availability of Paratext 9.5 beta! On behalf of the entire development team, we hope that this software is a blessing to you in your work for God’s kingdom and glory.
Download and Install 9.5 Beta
You can download Paratext 9.5 Beta from the downloads page today!
What’s New in Paratext 9.5 Beta?
Support for whitespaces and invisible characters*
This feature allows teams to view and edit whitespace and invisible characters in these areas:
- Text editor
- Wordlist
- Results list
- Scripture Reference Settings
- Numbers Settings
And coming soon in a 9.5 beta patch:
- Character inventory
- Spell checking dialogs
- Quotation Rules
*Opt in only
- Project members must all upgrade to 9.5 to enable the whitespace and invisible character features. As this changes the project data, it will no longer be backward compatible with 9.4 or previous versions.
- See this help topic: How do I enable whitespace and invisible characters for my project? for more info.
Study Bible Additions (SBA) Improvements
- SBA now includes support for Assignments and Progress tracking!
- Adds support for displaying figures in footnotes and sidebars.
- Scripture Reference Settings within SBA projects can now override the settings of the base project.
- Improved checking features, ensuring more accurate and efficient review processes.
Inventories
- Provides support for undo and redo actions.
- Inventory panels can now be docked.
- The appearance and behavior of inventory panels is now consistent with those of the Wordlist.
- Content approval is managed based on its location, whether in verse text, non-verse text, or study content within SBA projects.
- Includes support for filtering to help users easily find and organize inventory items.
Additional Improvements
We’ve also made these additional improvements:
- Added the ability to display multiple gloss languages in Biblical Terms windows.
- Added filter buttons to the Download/Install resources window.
- Simplified the process of creating and editing Interlinearizer settings.
- Added an “Unread and unresolved” filter to the Project notes list.
- Many bug fixes.
Please see the What’s new in Paratext 9.5? Help topic for more info about these improvements.
How to Install Update Patches
After installing Paratext 9.5 beta, update patches for will be available from within Paratext.
- Go to the Paratext menu > Help
- Expand to Full menus if necessary.
- Enable Automatically update Paratext
OR - Use Check for updates.
Compatibility with Previous Paratext Versions
It is possible to run both Paratext 9.4 and Paratext 9.5 beta on your computer at the same time.
However, for a project administrator to opt in to the Whitespaces and invisible character support features implemented in 9.5 beta, all team members must update to 9.5. Once this is done the project cannot be edited in 9.4 or earlier versions of Paratext.
Plugin Compatibility
If you use any manually installed plugins with your Paratext 9.4, 9.5 beta version won’t see them by default.
To use these plugins in 9.5 beta:
- Copy the plugins folder from C:\Program Files\Paratext 9\
- Paste the plugins folder to C:\Program Files\Paratext 9 beta\
If your plugin does not work after those steps, please report a problem to the Paratext developers team and to the plugin developers.
Thank You for Being Supportive!
We hope that you can take the time to try out this beta offering.
Please let us know how it goes for you. From within Paratext, you can go to the Paratext menu > Help > Give Feedback menu option, fill out the form, and click “Send” to let us know how we are doing. Your feedback is invaluable in identifying and fixing bugs. Positive feedback is also very valuable for team morale and for partnership development. So, please share your thoughts.
We are grateful to the many translation teams who work hard to make the Word of God available to all people throughout the world. May this software greatly bless your work!
Yours in Christ,
The Paratext Development Team