How do I change paragraph formatting at specific references?

Question

I'm trying to get good formatting for the letters in Ezra. There doesn't seem to be a single format of styles that will work for all of them. So my current thinking is that rather than giving the USFM markers global values, I want to specify formatting paragraph-by-paragraph with Scripture references. However, I've no idea what the code should be or where to put it within PTXprint.

As an example, Ezra 2:2-4 has the following USFM markers: 2a has \pmo and 2b-4 has \pm. How do I specify for those verses only that each paragraph should have space before, and be a different font (e.g. Arial rather than Charis)?

Answer 1

OK I'm a bit confused. Are you saying that in the master version it's just \p and you want to impose:

pmo - embedded paragraph opening
pm - embedded paragraph
pmc - embedded paragraph closing

Or is it that excessive use has been made of pm/pmo/pmc and you want to only alter how they are displayed in certain verses?

Styles are how you  change the font, size, paragraph layout, etc.  So, if the USFM is good semantic-based markup (e.g letters and other text where indentation is appropriate are marked up with pm*, nothing else is), then on the styling tab you can assign a font, size, etc. for that style. If you need to format Ezra differently to, say Revelation, then you can copy a style and make it apply to a single book, e.g. copy pm to id:GEN|pm (pm in Genesis - see the \id line for the relevant book).

If the problem is that the USFM is a total mess, then my preferred option 1 is talk to the translators/exegetical advisors, and get it changed in paratext.
Otherwise, (say if the original comes from DBL)  you can use the changes.txt file to apply changes on a specific verse or range. E.g. to get rid of all "\pm"s from the rest of the file, and put them back in a few places, you could do:
at EZR "\\pm " > "\\p "
at EZR 2:2-4 "\\p " >"\\pm "
at EZR 97:124-132 "\\p " >"\\pm "
(note the spaces after the codes)

If you have multiple paragraphs that need handling separately, you probably need to do something like:
at EZR 2:2 "\\p Dear" >"\\pmo Dear"
 
You can also, of course, combine these 2 approaches, making a special "pletter" which sets the fonts and layout nicely, and then changing  "pm" to "pletter" in in the relevant places.

Comments

IMHO, at the paragraph level the USFM structure breaks its own rules about marking things up semantically. On the face of it, there's just \pm to cover letters, prayers, decrees, etc. I want Ezra 1:2-4 (a decree) to display differently from Ezra 4:11b-16 (a letter) differently from Neh. 9:5b-37 (a prayer). Our output will be A5, two columns and using indentation results in unreadably short lines, so I'm looking for alternative formats that will help the readers to understand the different kinds of content. Changing the font seems like a good option for letters and decrees, but wouldn't be as meaningful for prayers.
Digging through the USFM documentation yet again, I see that there are \pi# markers as well as \pm. I'll experiment with those.

Answer 2

I've just thought... another option is to us a (user-defined) ranged milestone to mark letter vs  decree.
I don't know how paratext wants them used, but somehting along the lines of this is acceptable to PTXprint:

\pmo \zletter-s\* To the elect in ....
.....
\pmc Let him who has ears let him hear! \zletter-e\*

The \zletter-s / zdecree-s  can then be used to apply a specific font across a range of paragraph styles.

Answer 3

On approach is to use specific markers that you invent: \zpl and then use a contextual change to replace the \p as in:

```
at EZR 2:1-4 '\\p ' > '\\zpl '
```
Notice that we start on the previous verse in order to catch the \p before EZR 2:2. Then you can style \zpl how you want (typically, find the marker closest to the styling you want, say \p and click add to create a new marker in the stylesheet which you call zpl)