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.

Should you use the Paratext 9 Beta?

Yes, if you:

• want to try new UI features that let you organize your work environment to simplify your work.
• want to try Enhanced Resources for easier access to Greek and Hebrew, encyclopedia-length articles, images, and media from a gateway language translation.
• have good computer skills or support from people who do.

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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.

Brief description of Unicode Normalization

Unicode normalization  is the process of establishing the rules for how characters that can be represented in more than one way under the Unicode standard should be represented in a given project. Lack of consistency in how these characters are represent in a Paratext project leads to problems with searches and filters not working as expected, and can cause poor looking publications. …

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.  …

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. …

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.  …