Sidebar boxes as a cutout

Question

Unless I am missing something, it looks like pictures can be formatted as a cutout (i.e. text wraps around the picture) but esb sidebars cannot. Is that correct? I realize that there are a lot of competing demands on an already very impressive piece of software, but let me explain why this esb cutout capability would be useful for me. Our study Bible has (naturally) lots of pretty long footnotes. Occasionally, there is a perfect storm where a section title, a particularly long footnote, and the end of a page all come together, and there is simply no choice for the PTXPrint algorithm except to leave an inch of blank space at the bottom of one page and go to the next page with the section title and/or footnote. No amount of adjust lists or P_105 styles can possibly eat up that much space and still look good. However, back in my days formatting scripture in Word, I devised the technique of putting strategically placed pictures (in the narrative text) or text boxes with "sound bite" verses (in epistolary material) and sizing them just right (sometimes even on a previous page) to eat up some page real estate and solve the perfect storm. So if ever cutouts of esb sidebars can happen, it would serve not only decorative purposes, but also solve a practical typesetting conundrum.

Answer 1

Hi, sorry for not seeing this a month+ ago, I didn't see it.
Yes, cutouts are certainly possible.
The full documentation on sidebars is here:https://github.com/sillsdev/ptx2pdf/blob/master/docs/documentation/SideBars.md and unfortunately there's a mistake that the long list of positions was accidentally be truncated.  The important part was there, though: "Any image position may be specified".
  The user interface has been improving, but sidebars aren't in heavy use it's still not perfect yet; you'll have to open a manual style sheet and say something like:

---

\Marker cat:history|esb
\Position co
\Scale 0.5

---

That will put a "\cat history\cat*" type side bars in a cutout, 0.5 of the column width, on the 'outer' part of the page - away from the binding edge.

You may then play with the borders, 'logo', background figure, padding, etc. as much as you like.

A test-case, trying to stretch the code:


And an automatically-converted section-header sidebar, set as a cutout: