Can I get colored text using Print Draft?

Question

I am producing a Bible with added commentary \add …\add* that I want printed in color. By default \add is Bold and Italic. I want the text neutral with respect to bold and italic, in other words to inherit this from the parent paragraph it is in, and to be a particular shade of pink. In the custom .sty I use these parameters which give me what I want in the PT editor.

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\Color 16711935
\Bold -
\Italic -

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However when I create a Print Draft the \add text is bold italic and black.

What if anything can I do to turn on colors in Print Draft output?

I might note that color does not seem to be supported at all in Print Draft since \wj …\wj* is never formatted as red. So I am wondering if that is a built in limitation.

I am running this in PT8.0 but the issue also applies to PT7.6.

Answer 1

I can’t comment on the color issue. I’ve noticed it, but never spent the time to try to solve it.

I’m a little surprised that \Bold - and \Italic - didn’t work since those are the official way of turning off bold and italic. However, I’ve noticed that they also cause PrintDraft to add a - to the beginning of the file. As a result I’ve discovered that \Regular (with nothing after it) does the same thing but without adding extra characters to the PrintDraft pdf.

Comments

I searched the ptx2pdf macros and found that we are only reading the \Color
line from the style sheet and never using it. Getting this to work would be
a feature request.

We added \Regular as a way of turning off the other style settings since I
couldn’t figure out how to handle the - argument in Tex macros.

John+Wickberg

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Thanks for this John+Wickberg. I tried it and it works, but not like I had hoped in Print Draft.

I put the \Regular tag into my custom.sty. It does remove the bold and italic from the character style, both in the Paratext editor and in Print Draft. In the editor it works as expected—it makes the character style neutral with respect to bold and italic. However in Print Draft the character style overrides the style of the parent paragraph forcing not italic and not bold—but not only that, it also overrides font size as well, which is not affected by \Regular. So I suspect this is a more general issue with character styles than just the font face features.

I would like Print Draft to format character styles in the same way the editor does. Would this be a feature request or a bug fix?.

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From looking at the code, the font sizes in the style sheet are scaled
according to how ratio of the font size from the Print Draft form and the
font size on the \p marker, so you should be getting an adjusted size and
not the original size.

If that’s not what is happening, that would be a bug and you should report
it.

\Regular should only affect Bold and Italic, not font size.

John+Wickberg