How do I make a user-defined marker take a number as its argument

Question

I have added a user-defined marker to my Paratext setup. I need it to specify something called the exegetical indentation. Basically this is just a number that is added at various places in the text. It works somewhat like a verse number, except the numbers are not consecutive.

In order to make this work, I have added this to custom.sty:

\Marker zei
\Endmarker zei*
\Name zei...zei* - Number for exegetical indent
\Description A number indicating the exegetical indentation value
\OccursUnder lh li li1 li2 li3 li4 lf lim lim1 lim2 lim3 lim4 m mi nb p pc ph phi pi pi1 pi2 pi3 pr pmo pm pmc pmr po q q1 q2 q3 q4 qc qr qd qm qm1 qm2 qm3 tr tc1 tc2 tc3 tc4 tcr1 tcr2 tcr3 tcr4 s3 d sp
\TextType Other
\TextProperties nonpublishable
\StyleType Character
\FontSize 9
\Color 16711935

In Paratext's standard layout, this displays a text such as "\zei 7 \zei*" in the specified color and font size, as it should. The problem is that I would prefer to write just "\zei 7" rather than "\zei 7 \zei*". In other words, I want the marker to work like verse numbers, where you just write "\v 7".

But if I remove the \Endmarker line from custom.sty, Paratext displays all the following text in the specified font size, and I want it to affect only the number - just like it does with \v 7.

How can I make \zei just take a number as its argument?
 

Answer 1

\v is a very special kind of character style. Except for character styles in footnotes and cross-references, character styles require a closing marker.