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What’s New in Publishing Assistant 6.1 Beta

Last updated: June 29, 2020

General Improvements

  • An improved and more flexible interface for creating and configuring custom page layout configurations. (PA-1343)
  • Improvements for how \xt fields are broken into multiple lines. (PAS-1720)
  • Allow a user to specify a bottom inset spacing of zero for the notes frame. (PAS-1722)
  • Change tables (changes.txt, headerChanges.txt, captionChanges.txt, finalChanges.txt, undoChanges.txt) now run an a fully Unicode aware environment.
  • Support additional image formats when replacing low resolution JPGs from the project figures folder with high resolution images. PA now automatically places a PDF, INDD, AI, TIF / TIFF or IDML file which has the same base name (e.g. Soldier.JPG could be replaced by Soldier.PDF or Soldier.PDF). (PA-1427)
  • Better default settings for Adjust Pictures tool (starts with adjust options disabled; sets the the current figure values of wrap and caption). (PA-1429)
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What’s New in InDesign 2019–2020

InDesign 2019 and 2020 both contain new features of interest to scripture typesetters. This brief articles highlights some key additions.

2020

Support for South-East Asian languages

InDesign uses a paragraph Composer to perform many different operations when formatting a paragraph of text – such as evaluating and controlling word and letter spacing and the location of line breaks. The paragraph Composer also interprets and supports the (sometimes very complex) information about formatting and positioning of individual characters (glyphs) provided by a font.

More than one type of paragraph Composer is provided in InDesign. The Composer is selected through the Justification properties for a paragraph style. (Publishing Assistant offers the ability to select the Composer for a job on the Job settings Layout tab).

Paragraph style paragraph composer selection
InDesign paragraph style options for Composer
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Improved Custom Layout – PA 6.1

Publishing Assistant 6.1 will provide a significantly improved and more flexible interface for creating and configuring custom page layouts.

This update focuses on 2 major areas: 

  1. An improved interface for creating and defining the content for page frames.
  2. More flexible options for organizing multiple marker types within a single frame.  
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USFM 3 Support – PA 6.1

Scripture translation projects working in Paratext 9 can choose to use new and updated USFM markup available in USFM 3. Publishing Assistant 6.1 has added support for USFM 3.

This article presents a summary of new USFM 3 markup which you may encounter when typesetting a project from Paratext 9 (or newer). It is not an exhaustive summary of USFM 3 changes, but focuses on the changes and additions which will be of particular interest to a Bible typesetter.

For a complete list of changes in USFM, please refer to the release notes found in the online USFM documentation.

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PA 6.0 and 5.1 Released

The stable release of Publishing Assistant 6.0 is now available for all PA users (as 6.0.100.1).  In order to install PA 6.0 you need Paratext 8 installed on your computer. Please keep in mind that PA 6.0 requires 64-bit Windows on your computer.

For those who decide to stay with Paratext 7 there is an opportunity to upgrade to Publishing Assistant 5.1 (as 5.1.100.1). Read the Upgrade and Migration FAQ page to find out more about PA 6.0 and 5.1.

Here is the full list of new features of PA 6 and 5.1.

You can find the install file and updated user manual on the Download page.

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