Paratext was designed to facilitate the hard work of Bible translation by providing the tools and resources to analyze the original languages and to enable translators to faithfully translate its meaning. Paratext is an excellent tool for translating the text, but publishing has traditionally been left to professionals. Even so, once a section of text has been completed inside of Paratext, translators invariably want to print it—whether for early testing or for intermediate publications before the project is completed. The simple File | Print menu option in Paratext wasn’t designed for this, and users have struggled to find various alternatives to print Scripture. Some use the built-in menu options, Export to RTF or Export Draft PDF (Formerly called Print Draft), but neither of these are complete solutions. To fill the gap, users have contributed other tools over the years, like Silas, WordSend, and Pathway. People have had various levels of success using them, but after all this time there was still no clear winner that we could recommend… until now.
PTXprint was developed by SIL International. It takes advantage of the powerful rendering engine that is already in Paratext and extends it. You may have already used Paratext’s Export Draft PDF, which you know can produce high quality PDF’s with footnotes and columns. But the configurable options are very limited. Image placement is difficult to control, and if you have any issues with the default options, there isn’t much you can do if you can’t edit the resulting PDF. PTXprint is a separate program that extends these capabilities and adds many new ones, helping users select the ones they want. It also has the ability to place pictures more precisely, and gives fine grained control over footnotes, headings, and columns. It can even print diglots and include page borders, something that can be very difficult even for professional typesetting.
To learn more about PTXprint, watch the introductory video above, or download PTXprint from this link.
