The Paratext website is an obvious place to list training events for people to learn Paratext or improve their skills.  To facilitate this, we have launched an events section on the website where Paratext training events will be listed, starting with a Paratext Training Course in Dallas, Texas, December 3-10.  Since there are so many organizations using Paratext, we can’t know about all of the training events going on around the world. So we are including a link on our events page for training event submissions. If your organization is hosting a training event and is able to make it open to others, we would encourage you to list it here.

If you have a larger group that needs training, please write to help@paratext.org and we will see if there is a trainer who is available to travel to your area.  Our goal is for every Paratext user to be working effectively with the software.

Whether you can attend a training event or not, you can always take advantage of our online training videos, found at https://vimeo.com/channels/paratext

We will continue to keep these videos up-to-date with future versions of Paratext, and are currently making localized versions in Spanish, French, Russian, Portuguese, Chinese, and Indonesian.

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The Paratext Support Team

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

e´-->\u00E9

When an “e” and an acute accent are typed, autocorrect will change them to a lower case composed é (U+00E9).

E´-->\u00C9

When and “E” and an acute accent are typed, autocorrect will change them to an upper case composed é (U+00C9.)
Note: Lower and upper cases have to be defined separately because they each have their own Unicode code points.

Typing Accented Consonants like Ŵ

w^-->\u0175
W^-->\u0174

Typing ꞌ as the Character for Glottal Stop

Many languages need to type a character for glottal stops. It is not recommended to use the apostrophe (U+0027) or the right single quotation mark (U+2019) since they are punctuation. Instead it is recommended that you use either the Latin Small Letter Saltillo (U+A78C) or the Modifier Letter Apostrophe (U+02BC) since they are word forming characters and not punctuation.
To implement this auto correction you will need to select a key on your keyboard that will then be corrected. Typically, a key that looks like the character you want to type is easiest to remember. So the acute accent key “`” or the apostrophe key “’” are the keys on the English keyboard that most look like the glottal stop character. You could use whatever key is easy for you to remember.

`-->\uA78C

Now, when an “`” acute accent is typed, autocorrect will change it to a Saltillo (U+A78C).

      –or–

'-->\uA78C

Now, when an “’” apostrophe key is typed, autocorrect will change it to a Saltillo (U+A78C).
Note: If you would prefer to use the Modifier Letter Apostrophe instead of the Saltillo, then replace \uA78C with \u02BC.

Typing ꞌ as Part of Velar Nasal Character (ngꞌ)

Many languages need to type ngꞌ to represent a velar nasal. We recommend you use one of the two characters shown in the above section for this.

Activate your autocorrect.txt file

After putting the lines of code into the autocorrect.txt file and saving it as a UTF-8 text file in the project directory, there is one more thing to do.  You must close Paratext if it was open and restart it.  Then you can test your file in any window that accepts the vernacular text.  If the results aren’t what you expected, you can close Paratext, modify the file, and open Paratext again until you get it right.

We hope this will save you many many keystrokes!

And how to fix them if it’s too late

Now that we have been doing migrations of Paratext data for quite some time, we have put together a list of things that should be considered at the time of migration.  This is great news if you are at the point of migrating your Paratext 7 project to Paratext 8. But don’t worry, even if you have already completed the migration, we’ve provided instructions for you too. It isn’t too late, but you might have some extra steps involved. Please read through the list below, and follow these topics to the website for more information if you should deal with any of these issues.

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.

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. The other Paratext computers scan the network, find the Chorus Hub on Marc’s computer, and offer it as a choice for Send/Receive.  In a translation office with poor Internet, all you need is a WiFi access point that is plugged in and running. Even if it is not connected to the Internet, it is the connection point that allows all the computers to share data using Send/Receive in a fraction of the time it would take over a slow Internet connection. If you are paying for bandwidth, it will also save money to do a Send/Receive locally, and sending to the Internet occasionally as a backup and for outside team members.

If you use Paratext Live for working together on a text simultaneously, a Chorus Hub can greatly improve performance when working in the same room as a team. And for normal office days, you can schedule Send/Receive to be done every hour over Chorus Hub using the schedule button. If you have questions about any of these features, you can look them up in the Paratext help menu.

Chorus Hub is developed by SIL for use in synchronizing lexical or Scripture data and can be found at https://software.sil.org/chorushub/