Garbage in a custom.sty stylesheet

Question

I have a project with a custom.sty stylesheet that seems to have lots of old stuff in it, including this section:

...
\Marker pc
\OccursUnder mt3

\Marker b
\OccursUnder mt3

# Custom style file created by the upgrade to Paratext 8.0. It is based upon
# the original style files used by your project.
# These files have been removed, but a backup of the files has been saved to
# usfm.sty.bak and custom.sty.bak.
...

In this project, they use \b markers in Psalms to mark section breaks, but they all appear in red, as errors:

I assume this is because this custom stylesheet says that \b only occurs under \mt3. I imagine if I take the \b marker definition out of custom.sty, that will solve that problem.

But I’m wondering what other stuff is in this stylesheet from ancient days (the upgrade to Paratext 8.0 is mentioned…). If this team doesn’t really have any custom style needs, can I just delete that custom.sty file, and make it revert to standard USFM styles? That probably would serve them better. Are there any requirements or gotchas that I should know about? Need to be administrator to be able to send that change?

Answer 1

Interesting… I actually took the \Marker b lines out of custom.sty, and now the \b marker doesn’t show in red, i.e. gives no error. So that would lead me to believe that the \OccursUnder line replaces what’s in the standard definition. I assume that the standard definition is the USFM.sty file found in the main My Paratext X Projects folder? The \b marker in that file has only a simple \OccursUnder c. So why is it now happy for the \b to be under a \q1? It appears that we need to work a bit harder to understand how this works.

But for my specific case, I assume that if I don’t have any special style needs for this project, I should be able to just delete the custom.sty file, and that will get me back to the default styles?

Comments

If someone would write up a formal description of “OccursUnder”, I would rise up and call them blessed (and that’s something I typically only do for my mother).

As you’ve discovered, the line in a custom.sty sheet replaces what is in the usfm.sty sheet. It doesn’t merely supplement or add to it.

Where the supplement idea comes into play is that in your custom.sty sheet, you don’t have to rewrite every line defined in usfm.sty; if you edit it, it overrides usfm.sty. But if you don’t mention it, then usfm.sty still is in effect.

Where I’m still fuzzy is exactly the scope of OccursUnder. I think what it means is “does this marker fall somewhere in the heirarchy under that other marker?”. So \b falls under something (probably \v), which falls under something else \c–the important one, which falls under something else–maybe \id, etc. It would be nice to see a flow chart or some sort of organization to see what (according to usfm.sty) is considered a subset of what.

---

mnjames:

If someone would write up a formal description of “OccursUnder”, I would rise up and call them blessed (and that’s something I typically only do for my mother).

Well it looks like Nathan will have to get your blessing…

How does the stylesheet specify where a marker is allowed to occur? Helps

In a stylesheet, \OccursUnder and \Rank work together to specify where a marker is valid. If a marker does not have an \OccursUnder entry, it can occur anywhere in any order. If a marker has an \OccursUnder entry, then it must have at least one “parent” marker in the OccursUnder list. A “parent” must occur before any occurrence of the marker concerned. For example: marker “\p” says “\OccursUnder c”; this means there must be a preceding chapter marker somewhere before the first \p, and it stop…

Answer 2

Hi jeffh. I often create custom.sty stylesheets (in fact, the above might be one of mine). The definitions given there are supplements to what is already in usfm.sty. The usfm.sty file will already have a definition for \b, including what markers it occurs under, so anything in custom.sty is in addition to that (not limiting it to ‘only’). In this case, the project apparently at some stage wanted to be able to have an extra blank line after \mt3, though of course it would likely have been better to just increase the ‘space after’ in the \mt3 style definition. As you say, a good way to check whether custom.sty is at all needed in the project is to take it out of the project folder and see what happens (what is reported by Run basic checks). However, in order to get \b to no longer appear in red, you should actually ADD to custom.sty:
\Marker b
\OccursUnder q1