Hanging verse numbers clashing with centre line on 2-column Ps 119

Question

Hi! In PTXPrint I'd like to use the 'Hanging Poetry Verse Numbers' option as it looks a lot cleaner. This is fine in single column printing. When I try and use 2 columns with a 'Vertical Rule in Gutter' selected, the verse numbers were colliding with the vertical line for double-digit verse numbers. To resolve this I increased the spacing on the gutter to avoid this collision (a universal parameter) and this worked at the expense of some whitespace on every page. Then I looked at Ps 119, with the only triple-digit verse numbers and these still collide. If I were to keep increasing the gutter width so that triple-digit verse numbers never collided with the centre line, that would waste a lot of space on every page. Is there a better option - to push the paragraphs to the right depending on the maximum number of digits in the verse numbers in that column? The only other option I can see is to remove the line, but this could confuse our readers in some cases.

Thanks so much! Phil

Answer 1

Hi Phil,

I'm slightly perplexed as to how you are getting the marginal verse numbers to run into the central gutter line. Here are the settings that I have, and they seem to be working fine.

and on the Body tab:

And that results in this:

To answer your question - Can we adjust these parameters just for Psalms? Yes, probably - but that would require a book-specific "hook" in the .tex file. I can look into the exact code and get back to you; but first I want to make sure you've got the basic settings right.

Comments

Hi Mark - what I have selected is not marginal verses, but Hanging Poetry Verse Numbers. I only want hanging numbers for \qx lines.

I tried to add a picture of my settings but it came out as a lot of code.

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Yes, the image pasting possibility in this forum has gone away again . The only way to get an image into the message is to click on the Image icon, and then upload etc.

Does changing this setting below get your 3-digit verse numbers away from the center line? [Others may be able to tell you if this can be changed just for PSA (or even just for PSA 119), and not the other books.

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I've just changed the First Line Indent Factor for the \q1 style to -0.20 and regenerated the PDF for all our OT books. The 3-digit verse numbers of Ps 119 now clear the centre line. Naturally this does move everything of the \q1 style in both columns to the right, leaving a significant gap between single-digit verse numbers and the centre line. \p paragraphs are left alone, so this means all poetic lines are indented c/w prose, but that's not the worse thing in the world.