How to make new section heading PDFs appear behind text instead of in front of the section heading covering it up.

Question

With an Arabic script project the existing 'A5 section head border.pdf' isn't deep enough to contain the text. I can create new larger border pdf's easily enough. But PTXprint displays them covering the text. How do I make it put the pdf behind the text or mark the pdf as transparent?

Answer 1

Have you looked with a separate PDF viewer? It might be a problem with the how the new viewer built into PTXprint is working, rather than the PDF itself.

The other option is to enable the newer cat:headingsbox|esb and cat:titlebox|esb styles (which automatically put headings / titles  respectively into a sidebar, which can then have boring or fancy made-to-measure borders, and anything else you can set for a sidebar)

Answer 2

Please send an archive (or even just the newly created .pdf file) for us to investigate what might be going wrong. AFAIK it isn't a "special" PDF, but there is obviously something different about it. [email protected]

Comments

Here is an archive of my project . I tried both SumartraPDF and Adobe reader to view the PDF but they both gave similar results. The font used is a tunned variant of 'Scheherezade New' with 'Kasra lowered', but I get the sane results with both Harmattan and the basic 'Scheherezade New'. In addition the 'han...' variants of the ornamental page border mess up on the first one or two pages but then display correctly. Also although I can click on the radio button and select 'PDF border' 'A5 page border.pdf' this border never displays even though the pdf file is present.

Thanks

Mark Skinner

Answer 3

Thanks for sending the archive. I'm still not sure how your new PDF was different, but I found that there is already a (badly named) .pdf in the C:\Program Files\ptxprint\PDFassets\border-art folder which is 'taller' and designed for Arabic script:
A5 section head border(RTL).pdf   - unfortunately, it doesn't work as it is, due to the (parentheses) in the filename (but this will be fixed in the next release of PTXprint).

But, as a workaround, if you change the PDF file name and then use that PDF, it works very well for what you need, and scales without distorting.

So, for example, change the name to be:
A5 section head border-RTL-taller.pdf

Notice that you can also SHIFT the graphic down slightly, and SCALE it to be larger if needed.

And you may want to consider making a small change in size to the \s Style so that the upper and lower diacritics all fit in the space available.

It all fits quite well once you've got the right settings!

It looks like the dynamically-generated Text Border also needs some settings tweaked:

Note that there are Box padding and Border padding settings; and it might help to use negative Box Padding.