Category: Paratext Features

This article discusses what causes merge conflicts and how to reduce the number of conflicts a team encounters when they use a Project Plan.

In Paratext 9, you can have multiple text collections open at the same time.  Several users have contacted us to say that this is very useful, and they think we should tell people about this feature.

For instance, a translator working in India might want to use one text collection for English translations and a second text collection for translations in Indian languages.  These two text collections can be used at the same time:

Because text collections can be large, it is often helpful to put them in autohide, especially if you have more than one text collection.  To do this, right-click on the blue title bar and select “move to autohide”.

Now you can select a text collection from the right-hand autohide bar when you need it.  If you do not need it, it is not in your way.  In the following screen, the autohide bar is on the right, and each of the two icons in the autohide bar represents one text collection that has been moved to autohide:

When you need to use a text collection, select it from the right-hand autohide bar and it slides out so you can see it:

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Paratext 9 will help translators work more efficiently through improved menus and window layouts, and by providing easier access to reference materials through Enhanced Resources.

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.

With a single click, the administrator can check off all the tasks in a stage as being complete.  Let’s suppose that Genesis has already been consultant checked and printed.  We want to mark all six stages as having been completed.  We start by marking Drafting as complete:

Now all the tasks in the drafting stage have been marked as complete for the book of Genesis. …

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.  …

Organisations that want to track the progress of their various translation projects may now do so through Paratext. This is possible through the use of the project plan, and assigning tasks to team members. As tasks are completed, the progress is recorded. This data can be accessed by people in the organisation with the appropriate roles.

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?  …

Paratext is well known for its ability to synchronize data among multiple team members both online and offline. It was designed for use in areas with low bandwidth or no Internet, and so most teams are aware of its ability to synchronize data on a flashdrive. Very few people, however, know about another very useful collaboration option, even though it appears prominently in the Send/Receive dialog box each time you use it.

That option is Chorus Hub. It makes it possible to do Send/Receive over a local network, without using the Internet. Chorus Hub is a small program that you install on one (and only one) of the computers in your team. After you download and install it, it runs in the background and makes itself visible to the other Paratext computers on the network.

In the image above, notice that a computer with the name MARC-PC is running Chorus Hub. …