Publishing Assistant 5.1 and 6.0 contain identical features. Publishing Assistant 6 is required for working with Paratext 8 or newer projects. Publishing Assistant 5.1 works with Paratext 7 projects. Both versions can safely coexist on your computer.
Here is a comprehensive list of what you can expect if upgrading from version 5.0:
General Improvements
- Major refactor of the code used to convert the Paratext project files into InDesign format. This code in previous versions of PA was written in Python 2.4 and it has all been converted to C# .Net version 4.
- Numerous unit tests added to improve the integrity of PA before it is released to the field.
- Numerous bug fixes, enhanced exception/bug reporting.
New Features
- Option to mix footnotes and cross references rather than separating them.
- Have PA use BookNames.xml to prevent line breaks in references.
- Option not to indent initial paragraphs (after s r b…)
- Have the option to “Update headers when validating selected page”, this would be added in the “options dialog box”.
- Support for marginal verse numbers.
- To avoid measurement system ambiguity – entering a value in a measurement field should cause PA to add the default units if not specified by the user.
- Option to include cross-reference caller but leave out the callee.
- Option to remove / suppress illustration captions.
- If a user has disabled auto-update, should we inform him when updates exist?
- Alignment Helper: have PA help with setting top & bottom margins.
- Option to specify a different font for Main title (or Heading tab) or other non-scripture items.
- Hyphenate upper case words same as lower case.
- With new TOC handling, auto TOC generation always includes long name, short name & abbreviation. Allow customization.
- Hyphenation enhancement to PA settings.
- Better round-trip handling of // (manual carriage returns).
- Assist line breaks in xrefs by assigning char style xtSpace to each space in the xref. User can change style’s break behavior.
- When selecting Hide Chapter number in Single chapter books, the header should only show the verse range.
- Insert Pic and Page Validate should verify that images on the page are not low resolution thumbnails.
- On PA’s Job Specifications dialog Clicking the Template Refresh List Button should also reload the currently loaded template.
- Allow ms to span page in a two-column layout in the same frame as verses before and after, like is done with mt and mt2.
- Add a feature to allow users to specify the amount of space between images and captions.
- PA automatically configures Adobe InDesign to run in the region (Roman / MiddleEast / CJK) requested by the user.
Other Improvements
- New feature – Creation of Print-On-Demand bundles for submission to DBL
- Faster startup
- New feature – Generation of figure list for publications
- Add support for footnotes in peripheral books
- Add support for w y|zw* (glossary marker)