Paratext 8 has a built-in system for tracking your translation team’s progress that can give an estimate of how much time it will take to accomplish your project’s goal.  This can be useful for the team during yearly planning sessions when tasks are assigned to various team members. It can also allow administrators to track their team’s progress and be notified of potential issues long before the next planning and review session.  But if you are going to take advantage of these features, you need to do a bit of configuring. …  read more

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. …  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. …  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! …  read more

Paratext Now Gives Users Control over Normalization

A recent update has added a new normalization setting.

We are recommending that users review this setting and determine if a change should be made for their projects.

The majority of projects migrated from Paratext 7 will have normalization set to “Off”.  This might not be the best setting for your project.  The rest of this article describes in very brief form what Unicode normalization is, and the meaning of the three available settings for it.  It will be up to you to determine what the best setting for your project. …  read more