How do "Space Before/After Factors" work?

Question

In one project, a classic footnote looks like this:

\f + \fr cc.v \fq keyword (mostly singular, if noun) \ft Plenty useful stuff.\f*

For a certain reason, we need a smaller space between the keyword and the explanatory text (to do with literacy-levels and with French-style punctuation; long story). So I tried the settings with \fq and with \ft and had no joy. Then I realized that \fq and \fq are technically "character styles" and the settings in PTXPrint are called "Paragraph Settings". On mouse-over I get a hint "Amount of space before (after) the paragraph". Now I am puzzled.

If \fq is not even defining a paragraph, but rather is defining a word or a few words as a character-style, what is a normal use of the provided "Paragraph Settings"?

And how can a humble clicker-user of PTXPrint change the space in a footnote between the content of \fq and the content of \ft ?

If there is a way to achieve this, with some advanced editing, I am open to instructions. Just hope to avoid inventing a wheel, which might already be available.

Comments

Based on this question and answer
https://support.bible/14848/how-to-increase-space-between-lik-and-liv1-ptxprint-setting?show=14848#q14848
I have made this temporary fix in the changes.txt

# replace the space before \ft by a narrow non-breaking space U+202F

'\s*(\\ft)' > '\u202F\1'

And I made it more readable to myself and team like this:
'\s*\\ft ' > '\u202F\\ft '

And at last I see some results in the output. (With the Space Before Factor and the Space After Factor I had not observed any visible response to my settings.)

Please note that this is just a comment for transparency, and showing that I put some effort into this need. Still hoping for a better answer, using the GUI.

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 (With the Space Before Factor and the Space After Factor I had not observed any visible response to my settings.)

fyi--I think Space Before/After applies to the vertical space before/after a paragraph, which, as you pointed out, is irrelevant to a character style. It's actually good that setting those values has no effect on the \f style!

Answer 1

I don't think there is a way to do this in the GUI.
The solution to use the changes.txt is your best way to control this. However, the option you have chosen may be too open since it will find any \ft in the text. You could try something like this:

"(\\fq [^\\]*?) (\\ft)" > "\1\u202F\2"

This limits the change of space to those that follow and \fq.

Answer 2

Space before and after are indeed paragraph settings, and are (generally) ignored for character styles. In fact, they should ONLY be used for heading styles, as otherwise they'll stop your text from staying on-grid, which is important for printing on thin paper.

The user interface doesn't hide paragraph settings from character styles,  because (a) it would be hard to do and (b) sometimes we (re)use paragraph settings to change the behaviour of another style.  For example in table-cells, "Space-before" lets  you set a fixed column width.

Comments

Thank you, this is helpful, since it is specific PTXPrint-GUI-behaviour that I need to learn. In most my other tools, unavailable or unrelated features are either hidden or grayed-out-and-locked. Not a criticism.

I begin to see that PTXPrint in the styles section seems to be always showing all options, and user has to figure which ones to use and which ones to not-touch.