What's New in Publishing Assistant 7.0

Installing PA 7.0 together with 6.1

After installing PA 7.0, you can continue to use PA 6.1 with existing jobs. Jobs created with PA 7.0 are entirely independent of jobs created with previous PA versions. For more information see the FAQs on PA 7.0.

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Highlights

Job Specifications & UI Update

Many changes and new features in Publishing Assistant 7 are found within the updated job specifications interface.

Improvements to the organization and presentation of job specifications will make successful job setup simpler and more efficient, especially for new users.

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Send/Receive

The new PA send/receive system makes it possible for users to collaborate on typesetting jobs, and for individual users synchronize work on multiple computers. A roles and permissions system keeps job assignments organized.

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CJK Grid Layouts

PA 7 provides new support for horizontal and vertical layouts for CJK texts, with an alternate Basic Setup interface for CJK grid jobs.

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All Updates

New Features

Redesigned Job Specifications interface

  • Features and specifications are more logically organized and easier to find.
  • Alignment Helper functions have been integrated into the Basic Setup interface using a new Optimize Fit utility.
  • Tooltip helps for all specification options (an option is available to turn off tool tips).
  • Values for calculated specifications are displayed in light grey text (instead of empty fields).
  • New relative unit options for selected specification fields, which produce values based on the body text size or leading (em, line, fraction, %).
  • Improved template browsing interface.
  • Updated toolbar icons.
  • Toolbar and specifications UI is now high-DPI aware.

Sharing jobs with PA Send/Receive

  • Multiple users can work together on a job. A single user can work on the same job on multiple computers.
  • User roles (Administrator, Typesetter, Observer), and book editing permissions
  • Cloud-based job backup. Option to ‘archive’ jobs on S/R server (removing them from the Send/Receive jobs list).

Horizontal and vertical CJK grid layouts

More New Features ...

  • Use InDesign ‘Conditional Text’ to replace all page processing metadata text which was previously hidden by special character styles within the body text story. This update was required for supporting the precise spacing requirements for CJK grid layouts, but it also improves the overall typographic quality for all jobs.
  • Insert / Update Table of Contents utility.
  • Optional toolbar keyboard shortcuts.
  • Automatic support for \cp (publishable chapter) and \vp (publishable verse) markup.
  • Option to ‘Preserve Space Before Headings at Top of Columns‘ in Heading specifications. The default for this new option is unchecked (disabled), which results in applying a baseline shift to position headings instead of space before and space after. The default also suppresses the addition of enableColTopExtraSpace paragraphs before headings.
  • Ability to override note caller sequences within a PA job, which does not require editing of the Paratext project language settings.
  • Support font family and style selection for footnote, cross reference, and glossary callers.
  • Specify a caller before and after glossary words.
  • Options for page header/footer for first page of a new book.
  • Utility to reposition frames for mirrored publications (helpful when left/right side page changes occur).
  • Option to ‘Ignore Unapproved Hyphenation Guesses‘ when using hyphenatedWords.txt.
  • Option to enable the HarfBuzz text shaping engine when working with one of the World Ready Composers.
  • Option to specify fake bold, italic, or bold-italic font styles (applies a configurable amount of character outline or skew as required).
  • Support default.isty to allow customizing new job specification defaults.
  • Support Alt-X in text boxes in UI, for toggling between Unicode characters and hex values.
  • Migrate old jobs (back to PA 2.0) into PA 7.0.

General Improvements

  • General performance improvement for many PA operations, such as adjust page.
  • More uniform shrinking and expanding of text when adjusting pages.
  • Resize the note frame if necessary after shrinking or expanding the note text.
  • Separated language settings from hyphenation settings.
  • Apply a paragraph style ‘f_x_padding’ to the empty paragraph between footnotes and cross references when “Space Between Footnotes and Cross References” is selected. This makes it easy to control the height of this space.
  • Allow Object Styles to have more than 2 columns.
  • Use separate object styles for header and footer frames.
  • Preserve text variables in current.txt and stylesheets.
  • Make the default leading for \mt1 and \mt2 multiples of the main body leading.
  • Diglot improvements
  • Improved the UI for the illustrations adjustment tool.
  • Improved the algorithm for sizing note frames in custom layouts.
  • Current.txt daughter files are now named current_section.txt as opposed to section_current.txt. This corresponds more closely to daughter files of templates.
  • Option to not stop on errors and keep an issue log when running Validate All.
  • Menu entry to rebuild the font catalog (Help > Advanced).
  • Utility to renumber the conditional text indexes (Help > Advanced).

Other Changes

  • Finish converting all vb.Net code to C#.
  • Add a title field to the problem report.
  • Change all template files (.isty and .istyp) to be UTF-8.
  • Put sidebars directly in the library without grouping them.
  • Support multiple Paratext projects with the same short name.
  • Support for new InDesign versions.
  • Enable PA use by ‘unsupported’ users. The training requirement has been removed. Now any registered Paratext user can install PA and use it together with a registered and approved project. Only users who have received some formal training or mentoring by an existing PA user will have the option to submit problem reports, use PA send/receive, or receive direct support from the PA project team.
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