Defining a new marker in custom.sty

Question

I’ve been working with a user who believed he needed to use a non-standard style sheet because he could not add a custom marker their project has been using for years to custom.sty. Changing to a non-standard style sheet led to the project not being openable by anyone else on the team, since the non-standard style sheet was not included in send/receive. Similar to the situation described back in October:

Stylesheet missing error message Questions

The administrator for a translation project in which I am a “translator” for deleted a style from the stylesheet (we have some custom styles, this was one of them). When I did send/receive to get the updated project, Paratext 8 reported that the stylesheet was “missing”, and could not load the project. This project had been successfully migrated from PT7.5 a few weeks ago. I checked the directory, and sure enough the stylesheet was missing. I asked the administrator to s/r again, but to no av…

I assumed it was possible to define new markers in custom.sty, and I eventually discovered I was right, but it was not obvious. When defining a new marker, you need to include the \StyleType marker in your entry, or else Paratext will ignore all other info about the marker and still consider it an unknown marker.

This is the example I did come up with that works (following the recommendation the user was already practicing, that custom markers should begin with “z” so a typesetter can easily process or discard them as needed).

\Marker zblo
\Name zblo - admin number
\Description admin number
\OccursUnder c
\Rank 1
\TextType Other
\TextProperties paragraph publishable vernacular
\StyleType Paragraph
\FontSize 12
\Italic