Files, cells & navigation

Inside a project, your text is organised into files and cells.

Files and cells

• A file is a unit of content: typically one book or document section. A project can have many files.
• A cell is the atomic translation unit: one paired piece of source and target text (a verse, a heading, a footnote, or another canonical segment). Cells are what you actually edit.

Files are broken into sections so a long file stays readable; for scripture, a section is a chapter.

When a project has several files that don’t already carry their own grouping (a set of loose scripture files with no book-level markers, for example), Aquilla lists them in canonical order, Genesis through Revelation, in the sidebar and in file pickers, so scripture stays in a familiar sequence.

The file menu: details and actions

Right-click a file in the sidebar, or open its ⋯ menu, for File details and the actions that manage the file itself.

One menu for the whole file: its bulk AI actions up top, its housekeeping below.

File details opens a metadata panel: the file’s Type (its format, like USFM or DOCX), Corpus (if it’s grouped into one), Book code (for scripture files), Segments (its cell count), Ordering (“Timeline (timecodes)” or “Sequence”), its Source language, when it was Imported, and its translated/validated Progress. If the file has been renamed since import, the panel notes what it was originally called.

The same menu holds the actions themselves: Rename, Move to corpus…, Segmentation…, Assign work (if you can assign), Export, and, for a Project lead or above, Delete. Assign work opens the assignment dialog scoped to that file, without changing whatever cells you had selected. Exporting a file you don’t have permission to export still opens the export dialog, but with an explanation instead of a download: “You don’t have export permission.”

Segmentation… opens a dialog showing how the file is currently divided into passages, since the AI translator drafts one passage at a time and reads the passages around it for context. Anyone can open it to see the current division; changing it needs Project lead access or above. Three ways to divide the file: Automatically (from the file’s own structure), Every N segments (a fixed segment count per passage), and Let AI find the passages, which reads the file and proposes a division you can review before saving.

Switching target languages: the lane switcher

If a project has more than one target language, the language tag next to the TARGET column header (at the top of the editor, beside the source language tag) doubles as the lane switcher. Maintainers and above get a dropdown listing every lane, with Change target language… to jump straight to the language fields in Project Settings; everyone else sees a static pill showing the lane they’re on.

On a single-lane project that same tag is your entry point to the target language itself: click it to open the language fields in Project Settings, or, if no target language is set yet, it reads Set target language. The default lane’s target language never follows whatever language the first imported file happened to be in. It always follows what’s set in the project’s settings.

The lane switcher lives in the TARGET header tag: maintainers and above get the dropdown.

Switching lanes changes which target text you’re reading and writing. Each lane keeps its own translations, its own validation, and its own progress: a newly added lane starts empty, and nothing bleeds between languages. Aquilla remembers which lane you were last on, per project, on this device.

See Creating a project for adding target languages, and Project health for how progress is tracked per language.

Archiving a lane

A target lane you no longer need can be archived instead of deleted. From Project Settings → Languages → Additional target lanes, the archive icon on a lane hides it: “Archive {lane}? It’s hidden from the lane switcher by default but kept; its cell data is preserved and you can restore it anytime.” Archiving (and restoring) needs project edit permission.

Additional target lanes in Project Settings: each lane can be archived and restored without losing data.

Archived lanes drop out of the everyday lane switcher, tucked behind a Show archived (N) control that keeps the list tidy. Open it to find an archived lane and Restore it, which brings it back to the switcher with its translations exactly as you left them.

Moving between sections

Expand a file in the sidebar and its sections appear as clickable rows, each with small translated and validated progress bars. Click one to jump straight to that section’s cells.

Note

For multi-language projects, these section progress bars currently reflect the default lane only. To see another language’s progress, switch lanes and check that project’s health overview.

Sections come from each cell’s canonical reference (for example GEN 1 or MAT 5), so the list always reflects the text you actually have: no manual setup needed.

Jumping between chapters, slides, or sections

Above the source and target columns, the editor shows a milestone navigator whenever a file has more than one segment to jump between: Previous and Next buttons around a button labeled with the current segment (for example “Genesis 1”). What counts as a segment adapts to the file: chapters for scripture, slides for a slide deck, stories for an IDML layout, sections for a heading-based document, and so on.

Click the current-segment button to open a searchable list of every segment in the file (its search box reads, for example, Find a chapter…). Each entry shows its size (a verse range for scripture) and percentage translated and validated; type to filter the list, then click an entry to jump straight to it.

For IDML imports, a story in that list can expand to show its subsections (for example Cells 1–25), so you can jump partway through a long story instead of scrolling from the top.

Files with only one segment don’t show the navigator; use the sidebar’s section list above instead.

Picking up where you left off

When you reopen a project, Aquilla restores your last location: the file and section you were on. You can step away and come straight back to where you were working.

Note

Your last location is remembered per account, per device, in your browser; it isn’t synced between computers. Open the same project on another machine and you’ll start from the top.

Searching and jumping around

Beyond the section list, use the editor to scroll through cells in order. The sidebar’s quick links (Living Memory, Comments, Voice, Members, Settings) take you to the project’s other areas without losing your place in the text.