Now that many teams are using project plans, some are reporting having more merge conflicts than usual.  This article is the first in a series that will discuss what causes merge conflicts and how to reduce the number of conflicts a team is having. First, let’s look at what causes merge conflicts.

What Set of Circumstances can Lead to Merge Conflicts?

Understanding what causes merge conflicts is key to preventing them. The Paratext Help describes when merge conflicts occur:

A Send/Receive merge conflict for a project occurs when the project copy being received and the project copy being sent from your computer contain a different change in the same verse. …  read more

Introduction

Have you ever discovered quoted text in a footnote, but can’t find that text in the verse? This happens when the verse text is updated and the footnote is no longer relevant.   Have you ever struggled to verify the references cited in a footnote, or had trouble keeping book abbreviations consistent?  This article will show you how to make your footnotes in a way that Paratext can help you check them for problems like these.

Quoted Text in a Footnote

Any time you quote words from the translated text in your footnote, you should mark them with the quoted text marker “fq”.  This will let Paratext know that the word or phrase is a quotation and the quoted text check will alert you when the verse and footnote no longer match. During the life of a project, it is very common to change the renderings of biblical terms of modify the spellings, causing footnotes to be out of date.  Running the Basic Checks on your project will ensure that the quoted text always matches what is in the verse.

How to Mark Text with fq Marker

There are two main ways to apply the quoted text marker.  The first is insert the footnote while the word or phrase you wish to comment on is highlighted.  This method copies the text from the verse, and pastes it into the footnote with the appropriate fq markers.  The second is to manually insert the markers and type the text into the footnote. We will show the first method below:

Insert Footnote after Highlighting Text

Highlight the text you want to appear in the footnote:

Right-click on the selection and choose Insert Footnote:

Paratext creates the footnote inserting the reference, the fq marker and the word or phrase from the text.

Type what you want to say about the text. If the footnote will include an alternative to the text as it appears in the verse, use the Quoted Text Alternative marker fqa.  Because fqa  text is different, Paratext will not compare it with the verse text.

When you use fq markers for footnote text, Paratext will ensure that the quoted text matches what is in the verse and will alert you if they are out of sync.

 …  read more

Do you find yourself stuck trying to type characters into Paratext that are infrequent but hard to find?  Have you ever gone to a Word document to find a character and paste it into your translation? Have you ever memorized the Alt + Number pad sequence for a special character and typed it in?  Then this article is for you.  Read on!

When many accented or special characters are needed, you should use a custom keyboard from Keyman, or Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC). However, many projects only need to type a few characters that are not on the physical keyboard. These would include special punctuation such as the em dash, ellipsis, curly quotes, and one or two accented characters. In cases like this, you can use Paratext’s autocorrect feature instead.

Autocorrect

Just like Word, Paratext has an autocorrect feature that the user can configure. You may not have heard of it because there is no option on the menu called autocorrect.  It is explained in the help file, but we will show you what to do here.

You can have one autocorrect file for each project, and so the file must be stored in that project’s folder.  Create a new text file with notepad.exe and save it in your project folder \My Paratext 8 Projects\[project name]. When saving the file, you must select Encoding: UTF-8 and the file must be named “autocorrect.txt”.

The basic form of each entry is:

word-->changed word

• There should not be any extra spaces unless you want them to appear in the changed word.
• You can use the actual characters or the Unicode numerical values in the format \uxxxx in the entries.

Here are several examples to clarify how it works:

Typing em dash

\u002D\u002D-->\u2014

When two hyphens (U+002D) are typed, autocorrect will change them to one em dash (U+2014).

Typing ellipsis

\u002E\u002E\u002E-->\u2026

When three periods (U+002E) are typed, autocorrect will change them to an ellipsis (U+2026).

Typing smartquotes

One of the most useful autocorrect examples comes straight from the Paratext help file.  How to create smartquotes “ ” just by typing angle brackets << >> and how to add hair spaces between quotation marks.

# Change space (\u0020) between quotes to hair spaces (\u200A)

“\u0020<-->“\u200A‘
‘\u0020‘<-->‘\u200A“
’\u0020’>-->’\u200A”
”\u0020>-->”\u200A’

# Change angle brackets into curly quotes

<-->‘
‘‘-->“
>-->’
’’-->”
---->–
–--->—

Typing Accented Vowels like É …  read more

One of the powerful new features in Paratext 8 is the ability to track your progress and to automate checks through the Assignments and Progress window. Progress tracking requires that a project has been assigned a project plan.  If you are the project administrator, you can learn how to do this from our Project Plan video tutorials. If a project plan is in place, this blue icon will appear in the upper right-hand corner of the project window.

Clicking the blue icon will open the Assignments and Progress window for the current book, and depending on whether you are a translator or an administrator, you will see either My Tasks or All Tasks. Tasks are marked complete here one at a time.  Below is an example for the book of Genesis.

This process is fine for new work, but what if you have several books completed when the project was migrated to Paratext 8?  It can be time consuming to individually mark all the tasks for all the books that you have already completed.  Fortunately, there is a much faster way!

Stages Table

There is a table that allows you to mark stages as complete per book. You can select the stages table view by clicking on the drop down arrow to the right of All/My Tasks and selecting Stages Table.    Below is an example of the stages table for an older project. (The project is using the 6-stage SIL project plan.)

In this view, the project administrator can mark whole stages and all the tasks they contain as complete–much faster than marking tasks one at a time!  As stages are checked off, Paratext runs all the checks for the next stage. It is common for Paratext to find issues as it runs the checks on older projects, because Paratext has more rigorous checks than previous versions. In the above example you can see that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all have issues in the third stage that need to be corrected.  Starting that process is as easy as clicking on the blue links in the In Progress column and resolving the issues found by each check.

If the project plan that was applied to your migrated project does not accurately reflect the completed work, you or your project administrator can quickly bring it up to date with the Stages Table.