FAQ
About PTXprint
Q: What is the difference between PTXprint and Publishing Assistant?
While Publishing Assistant itself is free, a typesetter must maintain an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. Most users will also require some formal orientation in order to learn and use the InDesign and PA typesetting process effectively. A user will observe the automated typesetting process as it occurs, and can pause the process in order to directly interact with elements on the page, if necessary. Working through InDesign results in an initial typesetting process that is slower than producing a similar layout with PTXprint, although the final production quality potential remains very high.
PTXprint is a stand-alone tool that does not depend on any other commercial software. Although the user cannot visually interact with the typesetting process, the PTXprint interface provides simple to use options for adjusting the final layout, such as the size and position of illustrations, or the length of paragraph texts. Although PTXprint can be used quite effectively by dedicated scripture typesetters, it was developed primarily with mother-tongue translators in mind. It allows translators to trial different layouts, fonts and sizes and get immediate feedback which will eventually feed into the formal publication process. Practically no training is needed to get started, and nearly anyone on the team should be able to produce high quality PDFs in minutes.
Q: What's in the newest version?
Q: Where is the training material for PTXprint located?
Q: Does Paratext need to be running for PTXprint to be used?
Q: Which scripts does PTXprint support?
A: In theory, all the known writing systems encoded in Unicode are supported. This includes the following scripts (click to zoom):
Using PTXprint
Q: How do I incorporate the key terms as footnotes? We would like to do comprehension checking while we’re also checking the study aids.
Q: How do I get the header to display the book and reference range in another language or script?
Q: How do I get the books to print in a different order?
A: You can use modify the order of books by typing them into the option shown here:
Q: Why does the amount of blank space at the bottom of each page vary so greatly?
A: The typesetting engine, TeX, works very hard to avoid widows (one line of a paragraph left alone at the end of a page) and orphans (a single line at the start of a page from the final paragraph of the previous page). In 2-column mode, it also places a very high value on ‘balancing’ the columns of text so they contain the same number of lines, to look neat. Often these two values clash resulting in a large amount of blank space at the end of a page (to prevent widows and orphans, while still balancing the columns). A third complicating factor is that certain parts of scripture need to be kept together. For example, a section heading \s, its following parallel passage references \r and the first 2 lines of the paragraph \p all need to stay together in a group. This results in situations where the whole chunk needs to move onto the next page resulting in a large space on the previous page.
There are some options which will help reduce or eliminate these large spaces:
a) On the Layout page, near the top right corner is an option to allow Unbalanced lines. Set this value to 2 or 3 (or greater) if you don’t mind columns not balancing. This will reduce the number of places that there are large gaps at the end of pages.
b) If you require columns to remain balanced, you can try balancing the page manually (while leaving the above-mentioned setting at 0). You can help TeX balance columns by using an Adjust List file to shrink or stretch paragraphs on the page. This is done by editing the Adjust List for the book being typeset which is accessible from the bottom right of the Fonts+Script page. The button takes you to an editable window on the Advanced page, where an Adjust List of hints can be generated, for you to edit. Often, stretching one of the paragraphs on the page by just one extra line enables several lines to reflow and fill the huge gap. Things to remember when thinking about balancing pages:
- Footnotes and figures are anchored to the line in which they occur, so moving such a line across a page boundary moves the other stuff with it.
- TeX is a good Christian, it will avoid creating widows or orphans, so if you have 3 lines left of a paragraph on a next page, you can’t pull 2 back across.
- Headings also take the first two lines of the following paragraph with them, for reason 2.
- For every line you take from column 2 to column 1, TeX needs to pull *exactly* 2 lines from the next page, in such a way that it doesn’t leave a single orphan line on that page.
Probably, if you mentally apply those rules to a particular page break you will be able to work out why TeX broke the page there. Then you can adjust a previous paragraph to perhaps make it longer and thus to only need to pull one line across and one from the next page, and so on.
There are a couple of (older) training videos available covering this topic in detail. Note that although the technique remains the same, some of the details are outdated. These videos explain in detail how to finalize the layout using either:
One warning. Only start addressing page breaking once everything else about your layout is exactly as you want it in terms of headers and footers, point size and spacing, styles, pictures, etc. Otherwise if you change anything after that, you will almost inevitable have to go through and fix page breaks later.
Q: Why can't I change the font size or the line spacing for the main paragraph \p marker? I can see it, but it is disabled and grayed out, so I can't change it.
A: This is because the \p marker is special and foundational for all the other markers. The place to change (underlying) Base Font Size and Base Line Spacing is on the Layout page as shown here (below). All other markers’ font sizes will update accordingly, relative to the Base Font Size, so there is no need to update them manually.
Handling Illustrations
Q: Why don’t I get any pictures? I have checked the option to include Pictures, but I don't see any pictures in my PDF.
Q: How can I make the captions for my illustrations look different to the main text?
A: These kinds of changes are easily made by adjusting at style settings for the caption. The easiest way to get to the appropriate style is to start on the Pictures page, and click on the \fig link at the end of the Caption box:
This should take you right to the \fig marker settings on the Styles tab where you can make the appropriate changes as shown below:
Q: How can I put credit overlays on my illustrations to comply with copyright and usage requirements?
A: There is a button on the Pictures tab, under the Details section. Use that as described in the image below:
For more in-depth and technical information, please refer to the PTX2PDF FAQ page on GitHub.