Types of pages

Question

Somewhere in the documentation I found the following instruction which I put in ptxprint-mods.tex.

\sethook{page}{-4}{\mark{\t@tle}}

This instruction has the effect of making the page in question (in this case page 4/iv of the roman-numeral pages of the front matter) be declared a "title" page which has the effect of surpressing  the rule across the top of the page under the header. So I am wondering what the other options for \t@tle are because now I want to force the first page of my glossary which for some reason isn't getting a header rule to have one.  I have searched everywhere to find a list of these but so far unsuccessfully. And as a trivial side question: Why do lot of these variables or constants have an @ in them?

Answer 1

Things with an @ in them are generally considered internal stuff that normal users shouldn't be using.  USFM is a (very) public set of commands, the \zwhatever stuff are meant to expose complex stuff for users, and there are various other ptx2pdf macros that don't have an @ in them, those are the public interfaces. As programmers, we try to keep public-interface calling conventions unchanging so that user's modifications don't get clobbered (which can lead to VERY strange and hard to debug results). Things with an @ sign in them are assumed to be private to the macros, and so we feel free to add/remove/rearrange arguments, etc. as necessary, and as long as we cope with refactoring the code-base properly, no one should notice.

Your glossary probably starts with \mt or similar, which is a title, and so the code inserts a \mark{\t@tle} there for you. There are only 2 magic values for \mark at the moment, {\t@tle} for title pages and {} which triggers the 'no verses' header style. Otherwise the first \mark on the page gives the book-chapter-verse for the start of the page and the last one gives the end reference.
Are you using the glossary-word header? If so, then to get that for a page that starts with a title, *AND a rule*, you probably want to insert a book-hook{GLO} or a page hook to insert  \mark{}.
Alternatively, if the rule isn't so important, you could use
\HEADFOOTset{H}{title}{l}{c}{r}{L}{C}{R}
to set the header contents (for a double-page spread) where l,c,r are left,centre and right contents on even numbered pages, and the capital versions are odd numbered pages.

Comments

Just to say that these techniques are still not getting me the rule under the header on the first page of the glossary. All the subsequent pages have the rule. Similarly, the first page of the maps XXM doesn't have the rule, but all subsequent pages do have it. It looks kind of funny to have just these single pages without a rule when all the other pages have rules.