Publishing Assistant: Any way to create drop-cap chapter numerals mid-paragraph with text wrapping around them?

Question

Many New Testaments represent Mark chapter 9 verse 1 as beginning in the middle of a paragraph, rather than having Mark 9:1 begin a new paragraph. In Paratext, I think this would be represented by something like a USFM chapter marker, then a verse marker (for verse 1), then a non-breaking paragraph marker (\nb).

What I'd like to see when exporting from Publishing Assistant into InDesign is verse 1 marked with a verse marker, and occurring right after 8:38 in the same paragraph. But I'd like to see the large drop-cap numeral for chapter 9 flush left against the margin, and with text flowing all around it. Here's essentially what I would like it to look like:

In contrast, here's what it looked like originally as exported from Publishing Assistant:

As you can see, originally, it looks like chapter 9 begins a new paragraph, even though that's not really how it's marked in Paratext. 

Has anyone else dealth with this, or know a solution?

Comments

As far as I know, there is no way to automatically get what you want out of PubAssist in this scenario. Only when you are typesetting the page, you get to know how much of the last verse of chapter 8 will flow into the first line of chapter 9 (in your example only "ἁγίων").
What we did in these cases was to give the first couple of words in \nb paragraphs a magenta color (via finalChanges.txt) so that the typesetter does not forget to manually change it.

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Thank you! That is a clear response, and it answers my question. But it leads to my next question, as I wonder if there's any way to somehow automate this in my case: I noticed that in Publishing Assistant, there's a menu item that refers to running C# scripts. I've been developing in C# for several decades, so I'm wondering if writing C# scripts would allow me to modify what Publishing Assistant outputs to InDesign. Is there any documentation on the Publishing Assistant object model or API, so that I might discover how to write C# scripts?

Answer 1

I'm not aware of any easy way to automate this since you don't know how much of the prior verse would need to be included after the chapter number. Hopefully, this does not occur lots - I'm only aware of a few places in the NT where this occurs. The NIV has 16 occurrences of \nb in the Bible