Print Draft A5 2-Column: First page shifted to left

Question

In Print Draft (PT 9), if I select Page Size A5 and also select two columns, the format of the first page is all wrong: the whole page is shifted to the left so that the left edge of the left column isn’t included in the output. A5 one-column is just fine.

image830×774 70.6 KB

We use A5 so that we can do booklet printing and get two A5 pages on one A4.

Answer 1

That probably means that there is a problem in XeTeX, or in our scripts that run inside XeTeX. It’s probably best to create a problem report (Help > Give feedback) so we can look at it.

Unfortunately, anyone who knew XeTeX has left the Paratext development team, so I’m not making any guarantees that it will be fixed quickly.

Comments

I’ve duplicated it on a Thai script project. See PTX-19734.

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Where do I find PTX-19734 ?

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That is for the Paratext developers, I made a report of the issue to be investigated and that was its number.

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The problem is because of what is in the custom.sty. The comments in custom.sty explain which lines create problems for the margins.

Your test project probably avoided the problem by not having the custom.sty file.

sewhite
White
Language Technology Use
SIL International

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Eastern Time (UTC -5:00 / -4:00)

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No, I copied custom.sty to the new project. [BUT – only to the
PrintDraft folder, so see below]

I see now I didn't copy NestedStyles.sty.
Copied NestedStyles.sty, no change.
Copied figures folder, no change.
Copied AdjLists folder, no change.

However, I see that the NestedStyles.sty file on the new project

gets changed to an empty file when I run PrintDraft. Not sure what
the double definition of marker wjXw is meant to do.

Using Ctrl+Shift+Enter to preserve intermediate files.
(a) .log file: only difference (other than the differently named

projects) is:

Reading Paratext stylesheet “custom.sty”…

  Reading Paratext stylesheet "NestedStyles.sty"... \wjXw \wjXw

vs

  Reading Paratext stylesheet

“NestedStyles.sty”…

So, the new project is not reading the custom.sty file. Not sure how

to get it to do that. (Or is it located somewhere else and copied??)

(b) printdraft-PDMP-MAT.tex file (other than date and filename

differences):

%%%%% Stylesheets %%%%%

  \stylesheet{usfm.sty}

  \stylesheet{custom.sty}

  \stylesheet{NestedStyles.sty}

vs

%%%%% Stylesheets %%%%%

\stylesheet{usfm.sty}

\stylesheet{NestedStyles.sty}

So, again, it doesn't pick up the custom.sty file.

*.parlocs files are different (as would be expected since the output

is different.

I see now that there's a custom.sty file in the PDMP folder, so I

copied that to my PDMP2 folder. And now I see the issue with the
incorrect margins on page 1.

Thanks,

anon806807

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Hi, sewhite. Thanks for investigating this. It sounds like your reply is specific to the PDMP project referenced above, is that right?

I wonder whether you could provide guidance as to what I should look for in our project’s (by no means minimal!) custom.sty. I would also love to know where I could find documentation on well-formed (and ill-formed) code for .sty files in Paratext. Thanks.

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The issue seems to be using the - character to turn off an attribute.
I think in your custom.sty you had some of these in the \Marker nd section.

I think your’s had this part:
Marker nd
\OccursUnder ip im ipi imi ipq imq ipr iq iq1 iq2 li li1 li2 li3 li4 m mi nb p pc pi pi1 pi2 pi3 pr
pmo pm pmc pmr q q1 q2 q3 q4 qc qr qm qm1 qm2 sp tc1 tc2 tc3 ms ms1 s1 s2 spd d ip
im ili ili1 ili2 io io1 io2 f fe NEST
\Regular
\SmallCaps -
\Underline -
\Italic

I think the last three lines are problems. Another project I saw recently had this same problem with a line that read
\Bold -

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sewhite:

I think the last three lines are problems. Another project I saw recently had this same problem with a line that read
\Bold -

I’ve encountered this issue many time in the past, and also seen recent mention of it (maybe on the ptxprint email list). As with a few other clashes between PT implementation and the xetex macros, I’m not sure who is ‘right’. I don’t think the USFM standard defines this sort of styling, does it?

The help built into PT explicitly states that you can use the - symbol to turn off styling (see “How do I implement a custom stylesheet for my project?”). But that usage also causes problems with the ptx2pdf macros, which expect you to use \Regular to reset font styling like bold and italics. Should the PT help files be edited to remove references to the - usage, or are there good reasons for using that over \Regular?

Answer 2

Do other page sizes work correctly with two-column layout?

Comments

1/2 Letter double column is also broken (same problem).

Double column for (full) Letter and A4 work fine. Single column works correctly for all four sizes.

Answer 3

If the Paratext project can be shared with both

• Martin Hosken
• Bobby

then we might be able to fix the issue. Both of us are involved with the macros that XeTeX uses.

Answer 4

I just noticed today you offered to help with this. I’ve shared a project called PDMP with you and Martin. If you make a printdraft in double columns with paper size of A5 or 1/2 letter, the left margin of the first column goes off the left edge of the paper.

Getting rid of the style attributes in custom.sty for the nd marker seems to avoid the problem. But why would modifying the attributes of a character style make the margins go crazy?

Comments

This problem has been around for many years. I never reported it as a bug (though it is). it would be great if it could be corrected.
My solution has been to use Adobe Acrobat (the paid version): Select all the text on the first page, and then move it over.

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Another option is to use the new experimental PTXPrint program. This does not show funny margins when a project uses the - key to turn off formatting. But apparently this can cause other problems as well, so using - in custom.sty should be avoided.

Download PTXPrint here: https://tiny.cc/ptxprint