How to unlink PTXPrint from a PT project

Question

A while ago I asked a question, which is almost the opposite, and I have received valuable input. The Other one

I am not trying to annoy you, please read at the bottom if you want to know why we are having this new question.

Now in 2026 the team is wondering, if there is a simple and safe way of un-linking their far advanced PTXPrint project from the source in PT, so that any changes in the OT would not automatically impact the layout any more. And of course the PTXPrint project should not be damaged by the un-linking. Best answer would be a feature that would allow the PTXPrint-user to control the link to PT like an on/off toggle-switch.



TL/DR:
Consider this need: A translation team is working on the Old Testament. At some point in time, they decide to publish a portion about the "life of David" (just an example) and get the funding and general happiness about this. A sub-team is now working on PTXPrint to get "David" ready for commercial printing. This is a side-project, so it is taking several weeks. 

While preparing the book about David, the main translation team keeps working elsewhere in the OT and every so often, there are changes to biblical terms (sometimes even corrections of errors; despite a valid consultant-check (it is a longer story, it does not belong here)), which also affect the texts about David. The team decides to wait as long as possible, so that the David-book will have the freshest and best version possible.

Now eventually, the PTXPrint sub-team, is ready to do the actual fine-tuning of the page-layout, with all the "Adjustments". This is the point, where any further changes in the text would no longer be helpful but would rather damage the layout of the David-book. So they declare an "editorial closing date". 

The team knows from a previous publishing project that PT offers a feature called a daughter project. They remember that there was some hassle to learn about those, to set it up and to operate it. There was never the courage or the authority to declare a killing-day for the old daughter project. It is still showing up in all the lists for send/receive. With the old daughter project and again with "David", they observe that the work on preparation-for-printing is helpful for discovering a few "problems in the data" (for example a dead and empty footnote, which PT-checks have never tagged; or some exotic mistake on a SFM, which was tagged by PTXPrint and could be fixed manually in PT). So rather than doing plenty extra-work with the operation of a daughter project, they want to focus on preparations for printing and stay well in touch with the main-team and with the main-PT-project or the main-PT-text, both technically and personally.

The PTXPrint sub-team feels that the life of David is good to have in print, but is not "structurally" important; it is just one specific portion of the OT. So rather than create another daughter project for each print-job, they would like to use the powers of the printing-tool (PTXPrint) to control when to link to PT and get fresh data and when to un-link and have stable-data.

Hope this makes sense. If we are getting things totally wrong, with our work-flow, do shout. Just be nice about it please.

Answer 1

Tim,

I think I understand what you are asking for now (sometimes I'm a little slow). What I understand is that you have created a PDF of a book(s) and need to continue working on that PDF without fear that it will change when the text in Paratext changes. For example, you have worked through chapter 1 of Matthew and you don't want a change to mess that up.

I believe the answer is that you simply do not regenerate that PDF. PTXPrint should open with the last PDF loaded and you can continue working on it without changes from Paratext as long as you don't regenerate the PDF.

That may not provide all the protection you want, but unless you were generating PDFs for other books at the same time, there should be no reason to regenerate until you complete the work on the first PDF.

Comments

Sorry, this time you have not understood my need at all: Not generating any PDF is the opposite of what we need: We are working on the PDFs, for a few hours each week over several weeks, since it is a side-project.

When we do work, we are fine-tuning the layout and we are actually re-generating the PDF dozens of times per hour to see each small improvement, before we move on to the next issue.

Answer 2

I can think of a few solutions to your problem, but each of them have some technical difficulties or potential points of confusion. I don't think there's anyway to do what you're asking from inside of the normal PTXprint interface.

1) Easiest solution:

Simply set up another folder or two with the important data from the Paratext folder (the .sfm files would be the main thing). When you want to work on PTXprint, close Paratext and move the current files out of the Paratext project folder and into some backfolder, put your old "static" files into the PT folder, and then run PTXprint. When you're done with your work, reverse the process.

This is conceptually the easiest solution, but it requires the user to keep very close track of which files are where.

2) The same idea, but using actual "versioning" tools.

Mercurial, which PT uses for Send/Receive, and Git are both tools which are built for this sort of task. "Work on my main text", then "revert to an old version and work with it for a while", then "restore my current main version". This can make the actual process of #1 easier and quicker, but if you've never heard of Mercurial or Git or "versioning" before, the setup might not be worth it.

3) Use PTXprint's 'archiving' feature

By default PTXprint runs inside your "My Paratext 8/9 Projects" folder, but there is a way to launch it so that it runs in a different folder. So you could create or PTXprint archive (or just copy the whole PT project folder) and put it in a different location, then run from there. The .sfm files in that location are static, not getting updated as you use Paratext. This might be the best way of doing things, but it means that whenever you think "oh, I want this new, updated information back in my PTXprint project", you'll need to do some hand-copying from the "My Paratext 8 Projects" location into the new location.

If any of those strike you as appealing, I can write up more and/or meet with you off-forum to walk you through things.

Comments

I thank you muchly for this very detailed and clear answer. It confirms a hunch that I had, and why I asked my question: In many other tools (like Scribus or LibreOffice) I have a habit of saving my work with a fresh file-name (using counters) every so often and after each significant step or milestone. Also seems that not many users are having a need to un-link a publishing project, once it has reached an advanced maturity.

I tried once, saving my first major PTXPrint-project under a new name in > Basic > Layout Configuration > Name and was sad to discover that I had lost many of my settings, just from the fact of saving under a new name. Seems that PTXPrint has its unique way of managing configurations. (Or possibly I had some weird side-effects on that day.)

I had hoped that there is a way via the PTXPrint "management" and your idea of using an archiving feature goes into that direction. I will read up on that.
Normally I do not need click-by-click instructions, consider myself a mature user. If you could just point me to any existing documentation of "archiving" that would be appreciated. I am still learning to deal with the distributed documentation of PTXPrint.

(If other people are reading here: I do not enjoy instructions by video. They are slow and not easily annotated or searched. But I need to testify that I have found some real gold-nuggets in several PTXPrint videos, where I was tempted to fast-forward and then did not.)

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Managing "configs" is much different, and it should be quite possible to have one config for a mature project and others for more active experimentation. Depending on how long ago you had an error where settings were lost, it's possible that improvements have been made to the way configs have been saved. Also, I know there's new development which will hopefully make balancing multiple configs in a project easier in the future.

But back to keeping the actual PT text static, which seemed to be your main question.

Here is what I would do, as it seems most straightforward (to me).

1) Create another folder for static projects. As an example I'll say it's at c:\temp

2) Copy your XYZ project to the c:\temp folder

3) Run ptxprint from the command line (or create a Windows shortcut), using this command: c:\Program Files\PTXprint\ptxprint.exe -p c:\temp

(note that I don't have it installed on Windows at the moment, so I'm not 100% sure that's the right path). This basically tells PTXprint to open up inside of the c:\temp folder rather than the normal My PT 9 Projects folder.

4) Should you ever need actual text from PT updated in your printing project, you'll need to manually copy the relevant file(s) from c:\My Paratext 9 Projects\XYZ to c:\temp\XYZ

Also keep in mind that your configs aren't being backed up or shared via PT Send/Receive anymore, since they're living inside the detached c:\temp\XYZ folder.

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Step 3) could be replaced by the following, but I suspect that simply copying the entire folder would be easier.

a) create an archive of your project inside of PTXprint

b) Run this once to expand the archive to that temporary directory: c:\Program Files\PTXprint\ptxprint.exe -Z archive.zip -p c:\temp

This will probably result in much less information being copied over, but possibly not enough. I think if you have hard drive space, that simply copying the entire folder would be better.

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I have just tried to method of copying my PTXPrint project to a separate custom folder, and then run from the command line like this:

"C:\Program Files\PTXprint\PTXprint.exe" -p "D:\[path to my new folder]"

It worked, PTXPrint opened without any error. But all my project and my settings are gone. I do not have any scripture text, I do not have the hyphenation-data, "Print PDF" does nothing for lack of data.

I believe that is because normally the PTXPrint folder is located inside a PT-project like this

"D:\[my custom path]\[PT project]\shared\ptxprint\[PTXPrint project]"

and can directly grab all book.sfm files, style-files, hyphenation data (which seems to be stored at the level of the "ptxprint" folder inside of "shared").
Oha: I just figured out what happened, while I am writing this feedback: You meant for me to copy my entire PT-project, not just my PTXPrint-project. That makes sense. I will start over and report in a few moments: Nope, similar disappointment:

PTXPrint did open without any error. But my entire project is "gone". Nothing under "Basic", no Project ID, no Layout Name, Layout like page-size, fonts, spacings, all gone. So this means that PTXPrint is storing "more stuff" somewhere outside the [PT-project]\shared\ptxprint folders.

Sadly, our print-shop deadline is getting closer. For now, I will need to rely on "social engineering": I will inform the main translation team of what is happening and that they should work mainly on NT areas, and as much as possible not touch anything OT, until I have a print-shop-ready PDF.

I am very much interested in having this question answered for the next print-on-paper-need. But soon we have intercontinental travel and a few intense months overseas. So if I will be less active here, it only means busy days. I believe we are close to a working method, with this "fork" idea. If you ever get near a windows-machine and have more input, I will glady have a look and store your help in my personal documentation tool. Greetings.

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Urgent:

After some experiments with a "fork", I wanted to back to the PTXPrint-project that I had been working on for several weeks. I cannot "find" it. Please help.

I tried just launching PTXPrint from the windows start menu. It opens a blank project.

I tried next, using the command line and pointing to the main PT-project: blank.

I tried next, using command line, pointing to the specific folder in \shared\ptxprint\ which has got the same name, as my "Layout Configuration Name" under "Basic" tab.

If PTXPrint is giving users the option to "Save As" there must certainly be a corresponding option to "Open Saved Configuration". Please advise.

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I've sent a private message.

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I managed to fix it myself. Thank you.

I have made notes in this other thread, since other users are also having issues with how PTXPrint is storing projects or settings/configurations:

https://support.bible/12683/named-configuration-management-has-some-problems