Erratic text directionality around numerals in Export Draft PDF

Question

I am working on an LTR transliteration of an RTL project. For some reason, the directionality of punctuation around numerals in a PDF export is sometimes reversed.

Everything looks fine in Paratext, e.g.:

But in the PDF export it looks like this:

Sometimes it is okay, but it is often very messy.

I thought there might be some invisible direction markers from the RTL source text still hanging around, but I have searched for U+200E and U+200F; they are not there. The numerals and punctuation seem to be standard encodings.

I do not observe this behavior in “plain” LTR projects, just transliterated ones. Is there some setting that might be left over from the source project that I need to change?

Answer 1

As you may already know, if you hold down the Ctrl key when clicking OK in the “Export Draft to PDF” dialog, then Paratext will preserve (in the PrintDraft folder) the intermediate files created during the process of making the PDF output file. In some cases this can provide information on where the problem lies.

Alternatively, you could try PTXprint .

Comments

I did not know that; thanks!

Thanks even more for the PTXprint tip. It works great, and all the punctuation comes out right.

So it seems that the issue is in the Export Draft PDF protocol…I will send a problem report.

Answer 2

It looks like there are some RTL markers in the project when you do a print draft. Try adding a PrintDraftChanges.txt file in your project folder that has the following line in it:

'\u200F' > ''

This should remove any RTL markers from the text that is processed by the drafting engine.

Comments

There was already a PrintDraftChanges.txt in the folder. I tried adding ‘\u200F’ > ‘’ to it, then replacing the file with one containing only that line.

In each case the output was not visibly changed.