How to ...

How to get help from the Bibledit community?

* Read the questions and answers.

* Search the mailing list archives to see if your problem has been discussed before.

* Subscribe to the bibledit-general mailing list, and ask the question there.

How to run two versions of Bibledit simultanously?

As there are some drastic changes between versions, it would be helpful to have two different versions running of Bibledit.

This is possible, but not recommended for production work, as they will be overwriting each other's configuration.

Do it this way.

Install the newer version according to the instructions.

When installing the older version, do this:

./configure --prefix=/home/joe/older
make
sudo make install

Then to run the older version, type this:

/home/joe/older/bin/bibledit

Joe stands for the user's name.

How to change the location where Bibledit stores its data?

Normally bibledit stores its data in subdirectory .bibledit of the user's home directory.

Changing that is not done from within bibledit, but involves some manual work. This is done for the protection of your valuable data. To change the data directory to a new location, do the following:

Quit bibledit.

Open a terminal.

Type command

cd

to go to your home directory. Let's say you prefer to store the data on /mnt/server/.bibledit

Type command

mv .bibledit /mnt/server/.bibledit

to preserve and move existing data. (When there is no existing data, this step is not needed.)

Type command

touch .bibledit-datafolder-pointer

to make a new file in the home directory, that will point to the new data directory.

Open this hidden file in a text editor and put only this one line in it:

/mnt/server/.bibledit

That's it.

Removing file .bibledit-datafolder-pointer will cause bibledit to use the standard datafolder again.

See also backup.

How to change the order of the books?

You can fully configure in which order Bibledit displays and prints the books. This can be done in menu, Preferences, Books. Drag the books in the order you desire, and then click OK to save the settings.

How to let Bibledit and Paratext work together on one project?

Paratext remains as it is, and Bibledit accesses Paratext's data files.

Below is an example that shows how to get this working. More information is in the topic about collaboration.

- We have a Paratext project in our Windows partition. It is at /home/joe/windows/My Paratext Projects/NDB. When Windows runs, we can work on those files using Paratext. But we wish to work on the same files using Bibledit too, from Linux.

- We start Bibledit and create a new project called Ndebele.

- We import all the files at /home/joe/windows/My Paratext Projects/NDB into our project, and choose "Link to them" in the import dialog.

You can now edit some text, exit Bibledit, go to Windows, and to Paratext, and see that the changes made in Bibledit are also visible in Paratext. You can make some changes in Paratext, save them, exit Paratext and Windows and go to Bibledit, and see that the changes appear here too.

How to move about in Bibledit using the keyboard?

Bibledit has several areas to work in.

In Menu / GoTo there are hotkeys mentioned to move between areas.

On some distributions F5 (Text Area) and Shift+F5 (Tools Area) work fine, but Ctrl+F5 (Project Notes Area) will not work. It leaves the cursor in the area it is.

What works fine, is the

* Tab key: moves between all areas counter-clockwise,

* Shift+Tab: moves cursor between areas clockwise,

with the exception text area to references area. In this case Shift+Tab has to used twice, as using it once goes to the verse box of the toolbar.

How to print a table of contents?

In the example below we're going to learn how to write a table of contents for a project consisting of several books.

The table of contents comes in the book called Front Matter. Therefore, add this book to the project.

Each book that should go into the table of contents should have a USFM indicating this. Therefore, go to chapter 0 of each book and add the \toc2 marker to it. For example, in the book of Genesis, chapter 0 might look like

\id GEN
\h Genesis
\toc2 Genesis

Do this for all the books.

Then print the project, and be sure to include all the books, including Front Matter. The table of contents will be there.

How to create a custom versification system or language?

If the versification system or language you need does not come with Bibledit, then you can create a new versfication system on the wiki of Scripture Checks. Once it is on that wiki, it usually makes it into Bibledit after about a week. This is the simplest way for you.

You can also create your own language or versification system and add it to Bibledit yourself. To do that, take an existing versification system textfile or language textfile from /usr/share/bibledit, edit it, and save it in the data directory, subdirectory templates.

Restart Bibledit, and you'll notice it creating new templates.

Notes.

The versification files start with vrs_, the mapping files with map_, and the language files with language_. It is important to keep that first bit, else Bibledit won't recognize the files.

If the name of a template you added is the same as the name one of the templates that come with Bibledit, your template will be taken.

As Bibledit evolves your versification system or language may not be compatible with a newer version of Bibledit. To keep it compatible, it is recommended you create your data on the wiki of Scripture Checks. A more important reason for sharing your data on the wiki would be that by doing so you would help others too in that they benefit from the work you've already done.