Omit book intro in secondary project of diglot

Question

We are typesetting a diglot project using PTXPrint, and the primary project has book introductions but the secondary project does not (nor are they desired for the secondary). Rather than having the right-hand side of the intro blank, we would like to have the book intro of the primary text full-page width, as it is when printing a monoglot project. Any ideas on how to accomplish this with PTXPrint? We did it once before in a PA/InDesign job by manually adjusting the intro frames for each book in ID, but that's not an option for PTXPrint. Is there any way of switching to full-width mode and back again? Or other suggestions?

Answer 1

Apologies for the long delay in responding to this question. There isn't an easy solution. It might be possible to use an \esb ... \cat category and \esb* to place one of the intros in a separate box at the top of the diglot text, but this isn't easy to automate.

Perhaps someone else has an idea of how to solve this problem, but given the silence, it is unlikely.

Comments

Yes, I agree, this is probably the only way to handle it at the moment. You'd need to find out a rule (or use a script) to turn the book intros into a sidebar.

Avoiding a sidebar... theoretically it should be possible to drop to monglot from diglot, but  it'd need some trial-and-effort to make it work, *IF* you had control of the USFM which is getting to XeTeX.
But there's no process to run a changes text on the merged USFM, and so the process to alter the files is going to be a painful process for you, unless you're very comfortable using a command-line:
It'd look like:
1. Run through PTXprint
2. Quit PTXprint
3. Modify the merged file under {project}/local/ptxprint/....
4. Run XeTeX manually
5. Generate modified TOC definitions if you don't want the basic all-books-in-order
6. Apply whatever postprocessing is needed.

Any modifcation to the text or preprocessing  would require you do to it all over again, and you'd need to alter the adjust lists by hand, like in the days pre-ptxprint.