Paratext was designed to facilitate the hard work of Bible translation by providing the tools and resources to analyze the original languages and to enable translators to faithfully translate its meaning.  Paratext is an excellent tool for translating the text, but publishing has traditionally been left to professionals. Even so, once a section of text has been completed inside of Paratext, translators invariably want to print it—whether for early testing or for intermediate publications before the project is completed.  The simple File | Print menu option in Paratext wasn’t designed for this, and users have struggled to find various alternatives to print Scripture.  Some use the built-in menu options, Export to RTF or Export Draft PDF (Formerly called Print Draft), but neither of these are complete solutions. To fill the gap, users have contributed other tools over the years, like Silas, WordSend, and Pathway.  People have had various levels of success using them, but after all this time there was still no clear winner that we could recommend…  until now. …  read more

In 2018, developers at SIL surprised the Paratext steering committee by coming up with a version of Paratext that worked on Android tablets and phones, and they did it in a relatively short amount of time. They were careful to warn users that this limited version of Paratext, branded Paratext Lite, was not intended as a primary translation tool but as a companion to Paratext. Now, a couple of years later, we took an in-depth look at how it is being applied to the task of Bible translation by contacting users. The results may surprise you! …  read more

Paratext 9 has been out for seven months now, and it is clear from the feedback we received that most people who have upgraded are enjoying it. The upgrade path is extremely smooth since there is no migration process, allowing teams to upgrade their users one at a time as they feel ready. Now, as we patiently wait for everyone to upgrade, Paratext 9 is getting all the improvements that users like you have requested, while Paratext 8 is only in maintenance mode.  Occasionally we discover users who are holding on tightly to Paratext 8, claiming that they’ll only move to Paratext 9 when someone forces them to.  This is certainly not the result we were hoping for! Recently, one user helped us to understand the root of this problem. …  read more

Applying a Project Plan to an existing project is one of the biggest frustrations for teams that are starting to use the Project Plan to manage assignments and keep track of their progress.  You may have a dozen books that are already consultant checked and some that have already been printed.  Yet, when you or your administrator applies a new plan to your project, you find that you are unable to mark tasks as done for work that is already completed.  The Stages Table provides a simple grid (below) that is supposed to make this easy, but as you will soon see, it doesn’t work as expected. …  read more