Paratext helps translators to translate the Bible. Publishing Assistant helps publishers to publish it. Developed jointly by UBS and SIL International, this software converts Paratext project content into fully styled Adobe InDesign documents. It automates and validates a large number of common typesetting and page layout tasks. With Publishing Assistant, new scripture translations can be accurately and efficiently formatted for printing.
What’s New in Publishing Assistant 6.0
There are many new features in this major new version. Here is a list of changes since Publishing Assistant 5.0.
Feature highlights:
Job Specification
Publishing Assistant provides a user friendly interface for entering page dimensions, layout design options, and type style specifications for a typesetting job. Multiple unique jobs can be created for a single translation text maintained in Paratext. All InDesign style configuration options for paragraphs, characters, and objects are supported. Text grid alignments are carefully preserved.
Layout Automation and Validation
Placement of footnotes, cross-references, headers and footers, and illustration content is automated, using a selection of page placement and formatting options. Header and footer content is highly customizable. Page content is continually validated to ensure that all elements are visible and properly balanced.
Language Support
Job specifications include support for InDesign’s right-to-left (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew) and CJK language features. Current versions of InDesign provide robust support for complex writing systems. Publishing Assistant is integrated with Paratext’s wordlist tool to provide customized hyphenation rules (for languages not natively recognized by InDesign).
Specialized and Custom Layouts
A custom graphical page designer and layout engine is available for handling complex study Bible features, or alternative layouts such as centre-column references designs. There are also special layout options for diglots (two languages aligned side-by-side) and concordances (integrated with output from Concordance Builder).
Release Notes
See also Publishing Assistant Features FAQ.