We will start out this tutorial by launching Adapt It for the first time. On this page you will be guided through the following steps:

1. Launch Adapt It
2. Run through the startup wizard
3. Resize the Adapt It window

This tutorial is also available in in Word format if you have downloaded the full installation of Adapt It.

Launch Adapt It

Step	How to do it	What happens when you do it
1. Launch Adapt It	double-click the Adapt It icon, or use the Start button, navigate to the Adapt It item in the Programs menu, and then double-click it.	Adapt It will open. It will show a “Welcome to Adapt It” window. Adapt It will create certain folders on the hard drive. All files associated with the application will be found in a folder called “Adapt It Work”, created in your “My Documents” folder. Adapt It will create other folders within the work folder when you create a project, and create documents
2. Get rid of the welcome window.	click anywhere in the welcome window	The window will disappear. The Startup Wizard window will then appear, so you can create a project and create your first adaptation document.

Run through the Startup Wizard

You will now be looking at the first page of the Startup Wizard. This wizard will take you through the steps needed to create a project, set up fonts and colours for the different kinds of information Adapt It knows about, and then to create and open your first document for doing adaptation work. The wizard’s first page looks like the following picture, except that the only item in the list box will be :

Notice there is a button at the top called “What is a project? …”. If you would like to read some information (in English) about Adapt It projects, click the button and a window with an explanation of projects will appear. When you have finished reading, click anywhere in that window and it will disappear.

Step 1: Create a project

All of the work you do in translating text from a source language to a certain target language must be done within a project, so you must create a project in order to be able to do any useful work. That is the next step.

Step	How to do it	What happens when you do it
3. Create a new project	click once to select the item, and then click the Next> button. Or instead double-click the button. <	Adapt It will close this page and show you the next page of the wizard. That page lets you tell Adapt It the names of the source and target languages. Adapt It will use these two names to make a name for the new project you are creating.

Step 2: Name the project

The second page of the wizard looks like the following picture:

Step	How to do it	What happens when you do it
4. Name your new project	in the Source edit box type the name of the source language; so type Tok Pisin in the Target edit box type the name of the target language; so type English click the Next> button	Adapt It will create the name “Tok Pisin to English adaptations” as your new project name, and create a folder with that name in the Adapt It Work folder. Your knowledge base will later be stored in this project folder, and also any documents in a subfolder called “Adaptations”. Make sure you never change any of these folder names that Adapt It creates for you.

Step 3: Select fonts

The next page of the wizard allows you to set up a font for your source text, another or the same font for the target text, and a third font (if you wish) for navigation text. Navigation text is verse and chapter numbers, and the names of SIL standard format markers (often called “backslash markers” – things like \v used for a verse number, \p for a paragraph break, \c for a chapter number, and so forth). Adapt It handles SIL standard format markers automatically: it hides them from you when you work on your adaptation, and it puts them back for you automatically when you Export… the document as a text file which can be read by any word processor application. The fonts page looks like this. (Note: only the Unicode version of Adapt It will show the 3 checkboxes for text direction; the normal version of Adapt It can only work with scripts which go from left to right, and so those checkboxes are not needed in that version.)

Each button opens another dialog. The Change… buttons open standard Windows font dialogs. The other buttons open standard Windows colour selection dialogs. It is a good idea to make use of different colours, it helps you not to get confused about which text is source text, which is target text, and which is navigation text. “Special” text is any text which is not part of the actual inspired scriptures, such as subtitles, book titles, file identification information, references, and so forth. Retranslation text is anything which you retranslate, instead of adapting. Navigation text is text shown above the source text line in the main window, such as chapter and verse numbers, and the names of standard format markers; the navigation text’s font is also used for many of the dialogs where you need to to type a language name or filename etc. A good size of text to work with is 11 or 12 point, and colours show up best if the text is bold, so we will do those things now.

Step	How to do it	What happens when you do it
5. Set the source text font, size and colour.	• click the top Change… button	A font dialog will open. Use it to choose the font, size, and colour. (We assume that doing these things is either familiar to you, or very easy once you see the dialog, so we will not go through the steps here.) Blue is a good choice for the colour.
6. Set the target text font, size and colour.	• click the lower Change… button	A font dialog will open. Use it to choose the font, size, and colour. Maroon or black is a good choice for the target text colour.
7. Set the navigation text font, size and colour.	• click the Change Navigation Font… button	A font dialog will open. Use it to choose the font, size, and colour. Use a colour very different from the source or target text colours; 10 or 11 point size is a good choice; a very distinctive font such as Tempus Sans ITC gives a nice appearance, but anything you like is okay.
8. Choose colours for the special text and the retranslation text	• click the Set Special Text Color… button • click any of the colours on the left, or drag the markers in the spectrum of colours at the top right until you get the exact colour you want • repeat the above two steps, but click the Set Retranslation Text Color… button instead • (optional step) you can click the Set Color of Navigation Text… button, if you were not able to get the exact colour you wanted for the navigation text when you clicked the Change Navigation Font… button • click the Next> button to go to the next page of the wizard	You can use any colours you like. Or you can use the one colour, or black, for everything. Adapt It’s behaviour does not depend in any way on your colour choices. The ability to use different colours is there only to make it easier for you when you are working on a document. You can click the To reenter the wizard at any time, click the Startup Wizard item on the File menu.

Step 4: Create a document to translate

So far you have set up a project, and specified the project name, and the fonts, styles, text sizes and colours to be used in your document. Adapt It has also created an empty knowledge base file for you, given it an appropriate name (for this project it will be “Tok Pisin to English adaptations.KB”, stored it in your project folder, and made it ready in memory to receive and store the information about your source words or phrases and what their translations are, as you do your adaptation work later on. The only thing remaining is to locate a source text file that you wish to adapt, and to create a document for doing the adaptation and storing it on your hard disk. The wizard page you are looking at now lets you make a new document; the page looks like this picture:

If you do not understand the difference between a document and a project, click the “What is a document? …” button at the top of the dialog, and a window having an explanation of Adapt It documents will open. After you have finished reading it, click anywhere in the window and it will disappear. You do need to understand the following: Adapt It “New” documents do not start off empty. Since you are going to adapt text from a source language to a target language, an Adapt It document must have the required source language text in it before you can do any adapting. Consequently, when creating a new document, Adapt It will ask you to locate a file containing the source language text you wish to work on.

Make sure your source data is “plain text” (with or without standard format markers.) If you are taking your source text from Paratext, be sure to check it is plain text. If it isn’t, Adapt It will probably fail when you try to create a document using it.

A note on standard format markers. Adapt It should work well, even with standard format markers it does not recognize. Unrecognized markers will be hidden in the normal way, and the text above that location will display ??texttype. Those it recognizes are listed in the Adapt It Basics reference documentation. However, you do need to understand the following point. Adapt It expects verse format markers to be in the form \v followed by a space, followed by the number (or number range like 2-3, or 4,5 for example), followed by a newline or a space, followed by the text of the verse. Alternatively, it will also accept \vn as a verse number marker. It will also permit \vt to be used as a marker for the text of the verse – but only use \vt if you are also using \vn for the verse number. Some users use \vn and \vt markers, and from version 1.3.6 and onwards, and also in the Unicode version, these two nonstandard markers are supported as well as the standard markers. The same versions also support the use of \nt as a marker for “note” text.

If you are doing something different with verse number marking other than \v or \vn, Adapt It may not work as you expect. Please be sure to use only \v or \vn for the marker for verse numbers. The use of \vt for marking the start of the text of a verse is optional; and if you use \v, then the standard convention is not to use \vt. If your data does not conform to these conventions, you may need to do some pre-editing of your source text in a word processor to get it into the right form before you try use it in Adapt It.

Later in your work, after you have created a second document or others, you would see their names listed in the list box in the above picture too. You could open any one of those documents by double-clicking its name in the list box. But since you have not made any documents yet, you are about to create your first one; let’s do so now:

Step	How to do it	What happens when you do it
9. Create a new document.	• if is not selected, click on it to select it • click the Finish button	Adapt It will open a standard Windows file input dialog. Use the dialog to navigate to the “Tok Pisin fragment 1 John.txt” file, and double click it, then close the file dialog.

When the file dialog closes, Adapt It will put up the following dialog so you can type a name to be used for the output file for the new document. The dialog looks like this:

Step	How to do it	What happens when you do it
10. Type a document filename	• in the edit box type a name for the output document; for this tutorial you might type 1John fragment (you can type any name you like) • click the OK button	Adapt It will take the name you type and add the .adt extension which makes it an Adapt It document filename. The filename will then be: 1John fragment.adt Whenever the document is saved to the hard drive, that is the name which will be used for the filename.

Can you later change the document filename? Certainly. However, if you want Adapt It to recognize the renamed document you must ensure the following two conditions are satisfied.

1. You must leave the filename extension as .adt and
2. you must leave the renamed document in the Adaptations folder where it was first saved.

Resize the Adapt It window

At this point the wizard is finished, and your initial document has been created and is visible on the screen. We will now resize the window so that you can comfortably view the text on the screen.

Step	How to do it	What happens when you do it
11. Resize the main window.	• click in the title bar at the top of the window, and drag it to somewhere near the top left of your screen • click on the bottom right of the window and drag the window boundary downwards and to the right until the window is the size you want • or, instead of the above two steps, click on the maximize button at the top right of the window’s title bar (it’s the button which shows a square in it) and the window will occupy the whole of the screen	The window will be resized according to wherever you drag the mouse while holding down the left mouse button.

You can resize the window at any time while you work, by repeating this step.

You don’t have to use the Startup Wizard to create or open a project, nor to create or open a file. If you prefer you can use commands on the File menu. The “Start Here” command allows you to create a new project or open an existing one. And the New… command, and the Open… command, may be used for creating a new document, or opening an existing one.

You have now completed the first part of this tutorial. Continue on to part 2