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project, it is very common to change the renderings of biblical terms of modify the spellings, causing footnotes to be out of date.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. …  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

Paratext has a feature called Paratext Live that lets a group of users edit the same document at the same time, keeping their versions up to date on each computer as they work together.  This can be used, for instance, when a group is discussing a text, allowing several people to edit the text and improve on each other’s changes, evaluating the result together before agreeing on the best translation.  This is similar to the kind of collaborative editing found in editing environments like Google Docs. …  read more

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”. …  read more

We are pleased to announce that Paratext 9 is now available as a beta version. Paratext 9 will help translators work more efficiently, creating better layouts, and providing easier access to reference materials through Enhanced Resources. It has already gone through a lot of testing and users have been very happy with it. You may encounter some minor problems that we aren’t aware of yet, so there will continue to be some minor changes over the next couple months as we work towards the official release. However, we are confident that it is stable enough for everyday use. …  read more