What’s New in Paratext 9.5

Paratext 9.5 released March 17, 2025

It is with great joy we announce to you the availability of Paratext 9.5! This release is dedicated to the 30th anniversary of Paratext. On behalf of the entire development team, we hope that this software is a blessing to you in your work for God’s kingdom and glory.

What’s New in Paratext 9.5

Support for whitespaces and invisible characters*

Paratext 9.5 introduces better support for displaying and entering whitespace and invisible characters. Any project can turn the display of these characters on and off. Projects that use a variety of whitespace and invisible characters will benefit from opting into or “enabling” the feature.

This feature allows teams to view and edit whitespace and invisible characters in these areas:

Text editor
Wordlist
Spell checking dialogs
Results list
Scripture Reference Settings
Numbers Settings
Character inventory
Quotation Rules

*Opt-in only

Before enabling the new whitespace and invisible characters feature in a project, all project members must upgrade to 9.5. As this changes the project data, it will no longer be backward compatible with 9.4 or previous versions.
See this help topic: How do I enable whitespace and invisible characters for my project? for more info.

Study Bible Additions (SBA) Improvements

SBA now includes support for Assignments and Progress tracking!
Adds support for displaying figures in footnotes and sidebars.
Scripture Reference Settings within SBA projects can now override the settings of the base project.
Improved checking features, ensuring more accurate and efficient review processes.
It is now possible to add extended notes and sidebars for added or replaced content.
Base project additional books (GLO, etc.) are incorporated in a SBA project.
Handling of whitespace and invisible characters is supported in a SBA project.
Adds an option for the default location of extended note callers.
SBA-specific spelling discussion notes can be created in the Wordlist.
Improvements to extracting a Legacy Study Bible into an SBA.

Improvements to Inventories

The appearance and behavior of inventory panels is now consistent with those of the Wordlist.
Inventory panels can now be docked.
Content approval is based on location, whether in verse text, non-verse text, or study content within SBA projects.
Support for filtering to help users easily find and organize inventory items.
Support for undo and redo actions.

Additional Improvements

We’ve also made these additional improvements:

Added the ability to display multiple gloss languages in Biblical Terms windows.
Added filter buttons to the Download/Install resources window.
Simplified the process of creating and editing Interlinearizer settings.
Added an “Unread and unresolved” filter to the Project notes list.
Provided support for the new format of Flora, Fauna, and Realia in the Enhanced Resource Encyclopedia tab.
Provided support for multi-language Flora, Fauna, and Realia.
Added a Help link for apparatus abbreviation in GRK Source Language Text.
Improved UI localization implementation.
Improved merging changes for project data.
Allowed changing inventories and settings for Transliteration projects.
Added ability to automatically format references when Scripture Reference settings are updated.
Provided a built-in Paratext annual survey invitation.
Many bug fixes.

Please see the What’s new in Paratext 9.5? Help topic for more info about these improvements.

How to Install Update Patches

After installing Paratext 9.5, update patches will be available from within Paratext.

Go to the Paratext menu > Help
1. Expand to Full menus if necessary.
Enable Automatically update Paratext OR
Use Check for updates.

Compatibility with Previous Paratext versions

Paratext 9.5 is fully compatible with 9.0 – 9.4, although the new features will only be accessible from the newer versions.

If a project has opted in to using (or “enabled”) whitespace and invisible characters, all team members must update to 9.5. Once this is done the project cannot be opened and edited in 9.4 or earlier versions of Paratext.

Note: If you had a previous version of Paratext installed, installing Paratext 9.5 will replace it.

Plugin Compatibility

If you use any manually installed plugins with Paratext 9.4, Paratext 9.5 should see them by default, but we cannot guarantee that they will continue to work as expected.

If your plugin does not work in Paratext 9.5, please report a problem to the Paratext development team and to the plugin developers.

Thank you for your support!

We hope that you can take the time to try out this new version of Paratext.

Please let us know how Paratext 9.5 works for you. From within Paratext, you can go to Main menu > Help > Give Feedback, fill out the form, and click “Send” to let us know how we are doing. Your feedback is invaluable in identifying and fixing bugs. Positive feedback is also very valuable for team morale and for partnership development. So, please share your thoughts.

We are grateful to the many translation teams who work hard to make the Word of God available to all people throughout the world. May this software bless your work!

Soli Deo Gloria!

Yours in Christ,

The Paratext Development Team

What’s New in Paratext 9.5

Page Contents

Paratext

News

Helpful Pages

About