Printing without empty verses

Question

Our project in Paratext has several parts of the OT that do not have verses or chapters yet, but we do have the empty markers in it. There are 1,000’s of empty verses. Is there a way to tell PTXprint to skip all empty verses and/or empty chapters? I tried the Bridge Empty Verses and Add (…) but that still doesn’t look nice with all of the empty verses. We would really like to have a clean draft to look at.

Answer 1

@rickarellanes Thanks for this question. Obviously we don’t want to make this too easy for people to do - as we could quite easily (and inadvertently) end up with nicely formatted scripture with whole chunks missing, and possibly no one would notice. That’s far from ideal. So the aim of the “Bridge Empty Verses” toggle is to ensure that it is obvious that some of the text is missing.

But yes, if you intentionally want to only print certain parts of the text, then there is a way to do this. It is called a “Module”. And a module, in its simplest form, is essentially a list of references that you want extracted (and printed) from the text. Search Paratext’s help for “Module” and you’ll find some more information there. Here below, for example, is a module for the book of Ezekiel:

\ref EZK 1:1-9
\ref EZK 1:22-27
\ref EZK 1:28-2:5
\ref EZK 34:11-15
\ref EZK 37:1-14

Save that as a plain text file and put it in your project’s Modules folder, or in Paratext’s “_Modules” folder, and then you’ll be able to call that from PTXprint to produce a PDF with just those chunks of text.

In PTXprint you can select a module from the Basic tab (when Advanced view is enabled):

Note that there are other codes which can be used to make the module more interesting, and structured. So for example, the following module includes a book title, new section headings, and “localized” references using the $(EZK 1:22-27) notation.

\id MOD Ezekiel segments
\mt2 Demo of the book of
\mt1 Ezekiel
\inc v
\s1 There is hope
\s2 Ezekiel's vision of God
\sr $(EZK 1:1-9)
\ref EZK 1:1-9
\sr $(EZK 1:22-27)
\ref EZK 1:22-27
\s2 God calls Ezekiel
\sr $(EZK 1:28-2:5)
\ref EZK 1:28-2:5
\s2 Sheep without a shepherd
\sr $(EZK 34:11-15)
\ref EZK 34:11-15
\s2 The valley of dry bones
\sr $(EZK 37:1-14)
\ref EZK 37:1-14

Will produce something that looks like this:

image642×524 36.1 KB

image1347×929 125 KB

Note that \c chapter numbers may need to be hidden unless you’re starting from verse 1. And there may be other things that need to be fixed to get the final result you’re looking for.

Comments

Very USEFUL information Mark! Thank you. This will be great news for anyone working on portions of Psalms etc.

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Thanks for this information. It seems like a very useful feature for creating a subset. However, since we had over 15,000 empty verses in the OT, it would have been very time consuming for us to try to create this file. And we would have had to add the entire NT in the module file. I was finally able to accomplish what I needed to do by writing a macro outside of Paratext to change all \v nnn that did not contain any text following it to use \rem v nnn. Now PTXprint correctly prints the entire Bible with no empty verses that were in the OT (we don’t have the OT completed, but someone earlier put in all placeholders for the verses).

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rickarellanes:

all \v nnn that did not contain any text following it to use \rem v nnn

Nice idea. Now to make it simpler for you, you could just add that as a 1-line rule in your PrintDraftChanges.txt file so that it does it for you on-the-fly rather than as a separate process.

# Turn all the empty verses into \rem[arks] so they don't print
"\\v (\d+(\-\d+)? ?\r?\n)" > "\\rem \1"

You can easily do this by editing the file within PTXprint:

Then paste in the appropriate “magic” expression, and save before hitting print.

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Many of our teams translate only a subset of Genesis the first time through. Some full chapters, some partial chapters, and they want the normal Chapter Numbers in front of each chapter.

This method of removing blank verses seems to leave varying amount of blank lines between the partial chapters.

Answer 2

Image of varying PRE-Chapter white space after stripping empty verses. The larger white spaces seems to correlate with locations that skipped empty chapters.

chapter boundaries450×877 78.9 KB

Answer 3

It is now clear that trying to remove all the empty verses (and mask the empty chapters) from showing up in the resulting PDF using a RegEx is extremely difficult. So we’re in the process of improving PTXprint to do this properly. However, this raises a whole bunch of questions/issues that we would like some user-feedback on.

Just backing up a little, here is what we’re trying to avoid:

image661×888 49.8 KB

And there is already an option in place to elipsize {…} missing verses so they appear like this:

image665×898 49.8 KB

The above is controlled by this option on the Body tab:

But that’s not particularly helpful if you are intentionally trying to publish a selection of translated verses, and would rather skip over (and completely hide) the yet untranslated verses. So this (below) is now possible (as soon as 1.9.3 comes out):

image1362×832 254 KB

But what should happen in the areas that I have highlighted in yellow?
a) Should we show a diaresis … after the chapter number? So after ch 2, 1-4 … 5 some verse text
b) Should we indicate that the chapter numbers 3-33 are missing in a similar way (with or without the chapter range)
c) What happens if there are verses missing within a paragraph? Should we just have … to show something’s not there/missing?
d) And then we’ve also got the headers to think about

Please pass on your comments, concerns and ideas; and if possible explain your use-case so that others can follow your thinking.

Does anyone currently use the option “Bridge Empty Verses & Add {…}” or should we re-purpose that control to provide multiple options, for example a drop-down button with user-selectable options:
Options for Empty/Missing Verses:

1. Do nothing (don’t hide them)
2. Hide them without any visual cue that they are hidden
3. Hide them and show ellipsis … to indicate that content is missing

Comments

I’d just like to chip in, that an issue requesting something other than 1-34 in the header is very likely to be marked ‘wont fix’. TeX supplies us with the first mark (e.g. GEN.1:25) on the page, and the last mark on the page. it can’t tell us how many things that the user thinks ought to be there are not there.

Answer 4

Answer 5

For the teams here, who intentionally translate only parts of Genesis, they want to print out a clean book with no hint that anything is missing (no visual clues). Other than not having all the verses, they want it to look like a “normal” book printing, with Title page, Chapter Numbers, Section headings, xref, footers, etc.

The Bible module is difficult to use for this, because Paratext Bible Modules do not include Chapter markers, etc. So it would take working around that shortcoming and trying to add them back some how.

So anything thing that is empty (/v /p /m /mt. etc.) should be ignored in the print process.

Thanks for your work!

Answer 6

For our team, we only have parts of the OT books currently translated and we want to be able to print a clean book of what we have with no indication of what is missing since we already know what is missing. We just want to be able to print it out and mark up the paper for corrections. It takes up too much paper to print all of the missing items.

We don’t use the Bridge Empty Verses option and we would be fine with reusing it for controlling the empty/missing verses or other items. I like the idea of having a pull-down list of options to let us decide what to do.

Thanks for working on this.

Answer 7