How can I make decorative border apply to last partial page of text in book?

Question

Printing with decorative borders, if there is more than about half a page of text on the last page, the border prints correctly. If only 2-3 lines or so, there is no border. If I tweak the line spacing and/or font size a bit, so that the last few lines fit on the page above, or the critical mass of text appears on the last page, the problem is resolved. But that is tedious. Is there a better way to solve the last page border missing problem?

Answer 1

It looks like your text contains no verse numbers on the last page. Verse numbers are the critical thing it looks for, as it's trying to distinguish between some introduction/'outro-duction' type text and actual biblical text. It can't reliably believe markers, because e.g. tables might occur in introductory text or verse text.

It looks like you'd need to move the verse 2 lines to make that happen, so I'm presuming that you don't want to adjust paragraph so much that you do that, though that's an option sometimes.

So, what you need to do is convince the code that there's actually a verse on the page, inserting the invisible "mark" that tells the headings, etc. which verse number it has got to. You can do that with the non-standard USFM code \zMarkVerseAgain, which you can insert via the changes.txt file.

e.g., if you have Mark 16:20, with "Amen!" at the end of the verse, you might do:
at MRK 16:20 "(Amen!)" > "\1\\zMarkVerseAgain"

(Double \ for zMarkAgain, as we want it to get to the output without being interpreted. The brackets tell PTXprint to remember what it matched, so the special sequence, \1 can put it back.)

If you are meeting this problem regularly, and never have \p, \q etc in not-verse-text, then you could probably use an end-hook for \p, \q etc. But I've not tested that.

Comments

Thank you. The MRK 16:20 "(Amen!)" > "\1\\zMarkVerseAgain" hack worked. Much appreciated. It would be better if I didn't have to remember to check each printout for the issue and correct when needed, but I can make do with this workaround. PTXprint is such a big help, I can't complain!