Improving [Hacking] Paratext’s Interlinearizer

Improving [Hacking] Paratext’s Interlinearizer

Some people who look at my Paratext interlinearizer window are somewhat surprised by the display.

What I really like about the Interlinearizer in Paratext is that you can adapt the HTML which powers the display by adjusting the files in the C:\Program Files\Paratext 7\Interlinear folder. Here’s what I’ve changed and why:

1. I like to be able to distinguish the different windows in some way easily visually, so I’ve changed the background colour (do this in MainDisplay.css).
2. I keep the interlinear text nice and small, but the popup menu is much easier to use quickly and precisely if the click targets are bigger. So I’ve made the icons for the buttons bigger, made the lines a little taller.
3. Especially when the buttons for edit/delete were small it was easy to click the wrong one. I rarely delete so that got left on the right while I moved the edit button closer to hand because I do much more often find myself needing to edit entries as I work out better glosses.
4. I also made the buttons fade out until you mouse over them because that helps to reduce some of the visual clutter. The words should be capturing my attention most of the time. Also having the icons go full opacity when mousing over is a handy visual cue that I’m clicking in the right place.
5. Finally a colleague wanted to hide the guesses (not previously-approved glosses) and you can do that by editing one of the files I’ve given below.

How can I make mine look like this?

Download and unzip this folder, then put these files in your Interlinear folder inside Paratext inside C:\Program Files. Keep a copy of the original version of that folder in case you need to recover your original appearance. Note that often Paratext updates will wipe out these modifications so you’ll need to do it again.

How do I make the red guesses hide?

open PopupMenu.css in notepad and look for

.guess 
{
color: ‘GuessColor’;
margin-left: 40px;
}

then add in this line:
display:none

to the middle to make it

.guess 
{
color: ‘GuessColor’;
display: none;
margin-left: 40px;
}

and they will disappear!

Note that because of restricted permissions in C:\Program Files you have to do any editing OUTSIDE of the program files folder then copy the file in, replacing any files in your interlinear folder.