Starting over with PTXPrint in a project

Question

I have played around with older versions of PTXPrint in a particular Paratext project, so there is \shared\ptxprint folder in the project folder. Given that I’ve played with a lot of beta versions, I would just like to start from scratch with PTXPrint in this project. I’m thinking about just deleting that ptxprint folder (including things that are shared with GIT), and maybe anything that isn’t GIT-controlled in the PrintDraft folder. Does that sound like a reasonable path? Or is there a better way to start from scratch with PTXPrint?

Answer 1

Yes, that’s a reasonable (and sensible!) thing to do. When I have done this myself in the past, I have taken the safer step of renaming the existing \shared\ptxprint folder so that if I suddenly remember that I have a carefully curated PicList or AdjList, I can go back to the renamed folder and retrieve it. Later you can delete the \shared(old)\ptxprint folder. Note that I renamed the shared > shared(old) so that it would be taken out of the GIT-controlled items. If I had renamed the ptxprint folder, there would now be 2 ptxprint-related folders in the GIT-controlled folder.

Answer 2

Here is a related question. I worked on setting up a PTXPrint configuration (fairly complex) in one project. Now I want to start from scratch in a new Paratext project. The configuration for the old project shows up by default when I first open PTXPrint. But if I change the Paratext project selected, all of the details of that first configuration seem to be carried over into the new project… including links to files from the old project, so that when I tell it to do its first Print, it crashes with missing files! (Specifically: the customized settings ptxprint-mods.tex was checked, but that file didn’t exist in this project.) When you select a new Paratext project that has never been selected in PTXPrint, shouldn’t PTXPrint create a default profile for that job? There is some advantage to being able to copy project settings into a new project from an old project, but it seems to me like just starting to work in a new project need to be given a clean slate, so the initial Print can happen without crashing at least! Maybe later on you could select a different project and configuration, then select the target project and give it a new configuration file name. If it sees that you have already done some PTXPrint work in that project, then it would allow the settings to be copied over. (But I don’t know, that’s pretty complex… Maybe you just need a Reset All Settings button, to be able to get a basic default setting that should always work.)

Comments

Thanks for this good suggestion for a “reset all” option. I agree that you do need an easy way to get back to a “safe and sane” version of all the DEFAULT settings without having to do this manually. I’m thinking we should change the “Delete” Config button to be a “Reset” Config button when the Default config is showing. (Currently it stops you from deleting the Default Config, but that’s exactly what needs to happen.)

In the mean time, here’s an easy workaround:

1. Close PTXprint
2. Delete [or rename] the entire Default folder found here:
   C:\My Paratext 9 Projects\XYZproject\shared\PTXprint\Default
3. Re-open PTXprint, and this will notice the missing Default folder and recreate a new Default with all the settings reset.