Keeping all the Sheep

When I wrote a couple days ago we still had not figured out exactly what went wrong. I think we know more about this now. It is a matter of keeping all your sheep

Keeping all the Sheep the Old Way

Traditionally when a project had multiple computers we would  assign editing a given book to just one computer at a time, e.g.: Joe will edit GEN on his computer but we will tell Bob not to make any GEN changes on Bob’s computer for now. After a while we use File/Backup on Joe’s computer, do a File/Restore on Bob’s computer. Now Bob can edit GEN and we have to tell Joe not to make any more changes for now.

The old way works pretty well as long as Bob remembers to hold off and not make any changes on his machine until he gets the backup from Joe. If Bob forgets, all Bob’s changes will be lost (without any notification that they have been lost!) as soon as Bob restores the backup file from Joe.

Keeping all the Sheep the New Way

With the new system both Joe and Bob can edit GEN at the same time on their machines as long as they don’t edit the same verse. So we could tell Joe to make changes in chapter 1-5 and tell Bob to work chapters 6-10. When Joe does a Send/Receive and then Bob does a Send/Receive to see those changes Paratext will automatically look at each verse and as long as only one person has changed that verse it will accept the changed version of the verse no matter who changed it.

What if they both accidentally change a verse? Paratext looks and sees who made the most changes in the chapter. Paratext assumes that this was the person that was “supposed” to be changing this chapter and keeps their changes. The changes made by the other person become change conflicting change notes that must be reviewed later.

You can see these conflict notes by clicking Project > Show Conflicts. To see only conflicts that have not been resolved yet make sure the middle drop down in the window says “To-Do Only”. You can click Edit and then use Copy (control-C) get any changes you want to keep out of the note and Paste (control-V) them into the main text. When you are done with the note click “Resolve Note” so that it no longer appears in the list.

If you are careful to never let two people edit the same chapter at the same time you will never need to worry about any of this conflict stuff. Sadly when you have assigned someone else to work on a chapter and then you glance at it the temptation to correct the spelling of a word or insert a missing comma can be overwhelming. The safest thing to do in a situation like this is to select the misspelled word and use Insert > Note to flag it as a spelling error to be corrected later.

What Went Wrong Recently?

For projects that are using Mapout.cct to alter the project markup or text, Paratext 7 (prior to version 5137) was falling back to merging data the old way, i.e. if two people edited the same book on two different machines one of their changes would be lost.

How Do I Know if I Will Have this Problem?

1. Look in the directory for the project. For project XYZ this would normally be “C:\My Paratext Projects\XYZ”. If you do NOT have a file called Mapin.cct, rest easy, you should NOT have this problem.

2. Click Help/About Paratext. Find the number that looks like 7.0.100.NNNN. If NNNN is 5137 or greater you will NOT have this problem.

How Do I Fix This Problem?

1. Until you can get version 5137 or later installed be careful that you don’t allow editing the same book at the same time on two different machine.

2a.  If you have Internet access: Make sure the menu item Help > Automatically Update Paratext is ticked. Connect to the Internet. The latest version should be automatically downloaded and installed.

-or-

2b. If you do not have Internet access: Ask someone who does to go to http://update.ubs-icap.org/Paratext/. Down load the file ptw70_5147.PUD (or the version with the largest number if 5147 is no longer present). If you use Internet Explorer you may need to rename the file back to .PUD after it is downloaded. After the file is hand carried to you on a CD or USB key install it by double clicking on the file name and then typing Y to indicate you want it installed.

Blessings,

Nathan