extensions.txt allowing multiple categories

[mhosken]

\rem, \sts are both allowed in a number of places in the grammar. Do we want to allow this for other markers and to allow the \category field to take a list of categories?

[KentSpiel]

Do we want . . . to allow the \category field to take a list of categories?

I believe we already do allow a list of categories. For example in a Biblica project \cat ex st dup\cat* means a footnote should be included in an extended and standard typeset and is marked as potentially needing deduplication. Do you mean something else by list?

[jwickberg]

I thought Paratext had a restriction on categories in the marker check, but I just looked at the code and it doesn't appear to care what is put there. We did add some UI to guide users in adding categories and the UI may be restrictive.

[KentSpiel]

The UI is implemented for Study Bibles in the Study Bible project interface. In Study bibles the category is limited by the interface to one category. That said multiple categories can be implemented using combined categories such as, for example, ex:st:dup.

Biblica use case

In Biblica we had a need to mark footnotes for reduplication. We also needed to mark footnotes for different publication styles where some publishers wanted minimal footnotes and others wanted to publish with all the footnotes, and others somewhere in between. Initially we added some markup to the verse numbers, which we used in our publishing process and stripped when we put the project on the DBL.
However, when @mhosken made clear to me that categories were legal in al footnotes I immediately implemented them in all our projects as the "correct" way to do what we were doing. I also considered if we should create combined categories using colons or simply list the categories separated by spaces. Martin and I discussed this and concluded that spaces should be legal in category content and it was simpler to just list the categories. By the way, in our implementation the order of categories is not important.
I do not expect Paratext to implement a Category IU for standard projects, nor do I expect the Study Bible UI to support multiple categories for notes. That said I would like for any such UI to not overwrite category info that may already be in the project.

[mhosken]

No this is the \category field in extensions.md not the \cat marker in USFM.

[mhosken]

Added to 3.1.1