[be] [task #8017] use/allow xetex as formatter

[Dennis Drescher]

Follow-up Comment #14, task #8017 (project bibledit):

Our branch development is pretty informal. Martin Hosken is my TeX Guru here
and we keep the code in our repository with the rest of our stuff. If you are
interested, you can clone our Mercurial repo and use it just like you would
the Paratext version.

You should be able to clone it with:

hg clone http://hg.palaso.org/ptxplus

To find the macros go to: bin/tex and you will find them there. It is
basically the same files as in the standard ptx2pdf package that you find on
the sil.org site. We keep it the same because we hope we can merge the two
some day so that others can benefit but no one is able/willing to take on that
project. We may just have to rename it and go our separate way some day. :-(

Our system will do a number of different high-end tricks that you wouldn't
necessarily need in your implementation. Such as "Flying Verse Numbers", which
are verse numbers parked out in the margin instead of in-line which is all the
standard ptx2pdf does. It can also start a book on the ending page of the
previous book. This saves space. That is not normally needed but on a recent
project which this was implemented for, it will save over 3,000,000 pages when
they print.

There are probably a couple other things it can do but they are not
documented except for in our publishing system wiki. The thing you have to
keep in mind is that these extra features cost more in terms of parameters
that the user has to deal with and the stability of the macros isn't always
what we would like it to be.

I'll be interested to watch this progress and I'm willing to help wherever I
can.

One question, do you have any ideas on how you will overcome the problem with
the data storage form. You keep your data in cv files and ptx2pdf needs book
files. Will you do a temp export and run that through? You probably don't want
to change your underlying model to a book container format. That would be a
lot of work.

Dennis

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