Combined verses in Print Draft header

Question

The translators I work with often combine verses–sometimes two, sometimes three. We use a comma as a separator, and include the number of every verse that has been combined, e.g., Gn. 31:17,18,19 (mostly so that new readers won’t be left wondering what happened to verse 18 if it was written Gn. 31:17-19).
Anyway, when I produce a Print Draft and combined verses are at the top of a page, the header reads: 31:17,18,19-32. Is there any way to have it read: 31:17-32?

Answer 1

I think this will do it, or at least get the conversation started.

Here’s what to do:
Open or create "My Paratext Projects\YOURPROJECT\custom.sty"
Add

\Marker v
\TextProperties verse nonpublishable

Open or create "My Paratext Projects\YOURPROJECT\PrintDraftChanges.txt"
Add

"\\v\ ((\d*)(.*?)(\d*)?)\ " > "\\v \2-\4 \\vp \1 \\vp* "
"-\ " > " "

Why it (hopefully) works:
As you send your text to draft, you’re changing verse numbers so that \v marks what PT expects to see, i.e. hyphens in ranges. You’re also adding \vp which says which text should actually be printed. In your PrintDraft, the header references are read from \v and hence will display correctly.

I’m not very good at using Regular Expressions, so I’m not confident mine will work perfectly but I know I have the general idea down. The second line "-\ " > " " is necessary because I couldn’t find a way to not create a hyphen when the verse only had a single reference in it, so I just created it and then deleted it when necessary.

Sidenote: In my opinion the edits to custom.sty should be unnecessary, as should my forcing every verse to have both \v and \vp markers. This is because ptx2pdf, the TeX macros behind PrintDraft, fail to follow what I think should be a simple rule: If \vp exists then print \vp and not \v. Else print \v.

[Edited to fix Regular Expression]

Comments

Sorry to say, it doesn’t work… With the lines added to PrintDraftChanges.txt, I get ‘marker errors’ that prevent a Print Draft from being created. With the lines commented out (with #), Print Draft works again. So there’s something up with the regular expression.
I appreciate you taking a crack at it, but don’t waste too much time on it–it’s not a big deal!

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Strange, I found that mistake yesterday and corrected, but obviously copied and pasted the wrong regex line onto the webpage. There was simply an extra \ in my line.

"\\v\ ((\d*)(.*?)(\d*)?)\ " > "\\v \2-\4 \\vp \1 \\vp* "

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This one works. Thanks!