Restore an archive

Question

I had my pdf looking just right and I made an archive. Then the translation team needed to make a bunch of changes. This took several months. In the meantime, PTXprint has changed and maybe I’ve changed things. When I produce the pdf now it doesn’t look good. How can I take what is in the archive and restore it to the right places so that I can use the same settings I had back then?

Answer 1

First close PTXprint, then if you unzip the PTXprint Archive file (e.g. <XYYprj-CfgName>PTXprintArchive.zip) into a temporary location and then copy the various config settings found in this folder to your live project, then it should all just work as before:

\XYZprj\shared\ptxprint\CfgName\

But, if the TeX macros have changed (which is quite likely if we’re talking several months since you last ran this Prj-config), there could be layout changes which will throw off all the careful alignment/balancing work that you’ve done. However, the archive also contains a backup copy of all the TeX macros, so you can tell the current version of PTXprint to use those older macros if you wish to match the output precisely. To do this, you will need to use the command-line parameter** to point to the location (\src folder) of those older TeX macros:

ptxprint.exe -m “path-to-old-macros”

I hope this helps get back to where you want things to be.

** Note that using the command-line options isn’t as slick as it should be. More information here.

Answer 2

You might also notice that there is a recently added command-line option -Z “full-filepath-to-zip-archive” which will unpack an archive for you into the location set by -p “path-to-temp-projects-location”. (But be warned that if you run again with -Z it will erase the previously unzipped files and re-create them afresh from the .zip file. So avoid running it with -Z twice if you intend to keep any config changes.)