Select two back matter PDFs from two different projects

Question

I need to append two glossaries to the end of my scripture portion. They are in two different projects because they are in two different languages. I don’t see a way to choose two back matter PDFs. If I choose one, it eliminates the other from the list of back matter PDFs.

I thought I had done this before. What am I missing? I suppose I could accomplish this by copying both of them to the same project or to some other folder where I can CTRL-click on them both, but copying a file to a place it doesn’t belong is not a method I want to teach my teammates.

Thanks for any help you can give me on this.

Answer 1

I’m guessing that if you need your teammates to be able to select any two pdfs they want, then that will need to be programmed into the UI and isn’t currently available.

But before going that route, is that what you need? Or are you talking a limited number of combinations of pdfs here? If so, why not combine them outside of PTXprint and then just import the combined file. I’d do this using pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf cat output newfile.pdf, but I’m sure there are easy ways to do it in Windows too.

Alternately, it’s probable that this could be done with some sort of sethook. The disadvantage of that is that the location of the pdfs would need to be inserted into the code as a text string (not a nice GUI interface). Is that something you could set up, or within the ability of your teammates?

Comments

Thanks for this option. I would prefer to keep my teammates inside of PTXPrint if at all possible so we’re not training them on yet another piece of software, but automating this via command line in a batch file might also be a viable option for us.

Answer 2

The hooks option:
\sethook{final}{extra}{\includepdf{/path/to/pdffile.pdf}

An option on linux would be to populate a directory with symbolic links, I don’t know if windows has that as an option. This could even be done on-the-fly by a sneaking the commands into a preprocessing script in the scripting language of your (target computer’s) choice. Probably there’s a better way using the graphical user interface, I just don’t know it.

Comments

In what file would I put the sethook command? This might work for one language, but it needs to change for each of 13 languages, so this probably will not work well for us unless we can include a variable in a sethook command.

Answer 3

@John_Nystrom We are working to make it possible (through the UI) to ask for peripheral books separately (not in Diglot format). So once that is possible, you won’t need to do anything complicated to get GLOL and GLOR to appear one after the other (and you won’t have to pre-export them first and then link back to them as peripheral add-on PDFs). Does that make sense?

Comments

Yes, that makes great sense and I look forward to using it. Will PTXPrint include pictures in the peripherals that are to be included in the publication when we use the “request permission” feature?