Replace regular space with thin space in a daughter project.

Question

We have a daughter project which takes a latin based text and turns it into a southeast Asian script which uses thin space.  The template created by the interlinearisation process gives us regular spaces.  We have not been able to find a way to replace these within Paratext, I am told that PTX cannot do this at this time.  PTXPrint can fix this but we are also using Scripture App Builder and it does not look so good.  Can anyone direct me to assistance for resolving this long-standing issue?  Kind thanks.  Mark Osborne

Answer 1

It sounds like you have an interlinear that is exporting to a daughter project. Is that correct?

If so, you could always do a find/replace in the daughter project to simply replace the spaces. If you ever re-export the interlinear your changes will get overwritten, but doing that find/replace again shouldn't be difficult.

Another option is to do the same thing in SAB as you are in PTXprint, making the change on the fly. The syntax is slightly different (maybe even a little easier in SAB), but what you've done in PTXprint should be a good starting point. In SAB look under Appearance-->Changes, and you should be able to add changes very similar to how you did it in PTXprint.

Comments

Thanks.  Yes it is a daughter project.  Since I was not confident to do the search/replace myself I contacted computer support but was told it was not possible at this stage. I was surprised as in the first drafts we were able to manually enter thin space using a Keyman keyboard.  Thanks for reminding me of the ability to do Changes.  I looked and had forgotten that we had already set it up at one time but it appears to not be working anymore.  Will take a further look.  Cheers.  Mark

Answer 2

Mark - Paratext 9.5 should allow you to have thin spaces in the text (at least the development build that I tested does). I'm not sure when 9.5 will be availble for beta testing.

Comments

Thanks.  Will be looking out for that upgrade.  Mark

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Phil, Will there be more space handling changes coming in 9.5? ~Mike

Answer 3

I've spent many, many days wrestling with space issues in Southeast Asian scripts. I have NEVER seen a publishing environment in which fixed width spaces such as THIN SPACE \u2009 or EM SPACE \u2003 produce correct output when used between words or phrases. Here are a few specific problems I have observed:

• Whereas a normal SPACE \u0020 will disappear at the end of a line when the preceding word reaches all the way to the margin, a fixed width space will either require sufficient space to appear on the line before the right margin, or the width of the space will pull the preceding word down to the next line, or the fixed width space will wrap to the next line alone, effectively indenting the next line of text. 
• Line break algorithms prioritize breaking at a SPACE higher than at fixed width spaces, producing ugly paragraphs with half-lines of text.
• A fixed width space cannot be stretched or shrunk in order to achieve fully justified margins or nicely balanced paragraphs. Only a normal SPACE character works for these things.
• A fixed width space may appear strangely when the user copy-pastes from an app into a messenger, etc.
• Phone keyboards can't type a fixed width space so a multi-word search in a phone app will fail.

The solution that I have found is to use normal SPACE \u0020 characters for both narrow and wide spaces. In PTXprint I use SPACE+ZWSP+SPACE to get a double (or triple) space at phrase breaks. In SAB I use two or three space characters, with a style containing CSS white-space: pre-wrap; to prevent the HTML engine from collapsing multiple spaces into a single space. In either PTXprint, SAB, or Indesign I can apply custom styles to the space to make it either wider or narrower.

Using fixed-width spaces within Paratext works mostly OK, though the punctuation inventory gets confused. My preference, however, is to avoid using fixed-width spaces in Paratext too because they're difficult to see. It's better to use a visible character (e.g. a comma at phrase breaks) and then change the character to a wider or narrower space at publication time.

As mnjames indicated, SAB is almost as flexible as PTXprint when it comes to implementing change rules, so you should be able to get perfect output in either program, if you have a working font.

Answer 4

Paratext 9.5 will permit the use of a variety of different space characters.