Personal books and fonts

I have been looking forward to being able to create Personal Books which will display in the font chosen under Program Settings (I currently use Cambria). I have not been disappointed!

However, a little experimenting seems to show that (within the source .docx file) any text set to display in Times New Roman will display (in Logos 4) correctly in the font chosen under Program Settings, whatever that font is. But if another font is used for all, or part of the text in the .docx file, then this text will not update to the font chosen under Program Settings but will be displayed as is. An example of this can be seen in the video featured on the blog this morning where two distinct fonts are visible.

Clearly there could be advantages to being able to set the font for some text so that it never changes, however, if you want it to change according to your Program Settings then it seems that it must be in Times New Roman (in the .docx file).

I have not seen any reference to this anywhere on the wiki page nor in what currently passes for a help file so thought it might be of some use. I certainly appreciate all the help I derive from those who contribute regularly to the forums.

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Comments

Graham Criddle

Hi - and welcome to the forums.

Very interesting observation.

But looking at a post from Tonya during the beta testing of PBB - http://community.logos.com/forums/p/34561/259348.aspx#259348 - it looks as though the intent may be to preserve the formatting of text from the source files into the Personal Book.

I presume this means that if a document uses "non-default" fonts - from a Word perspective - then these fonts are intended to be preserved in the PB and not subject to font changes in Program Settings. This seems to be the behaviour I see when testing this.

For this to work there would need to be some attribute in the imported source files to specify the "default font" of the document and I don't know enough about Word document internals to know whether this is the case or not.

I expect someone more knowledgeable than me will comment further!

Graham

Kevin Becker

When you change the font in your Word document, how do you do it? My experiments suggest that if you manually change a font away from its applied Word style that's when Logos keeps the custom font no matter what's in your system settings but when the font is dictated by a Word style then Logos uses the font specified in your program settings.

Graham Criddle

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/275379#Comment_275379

The fonts seem to be preserved - for me - whether changed manually or based on Word styles.

Kevin Becker

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/275384#Comment_275384

My experiment was to make the Normal font in word Comici Sans. The next line I manually changed to Papyrus. When I compiled the book the first line was in my default font (def not CS) and the second line remained Papyrus.

Please excuse my poor font choices [+o(]

JT (alabama24)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/275386#Comment_275386

Please excuse my poor font choices

[:D]

Graham Criddle

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/275386#Comment_275386

My experiment was to make the Normal font in word Comici Sans. The next line I manually changed to Papyrus. When I compiled the book the first line was in my default font (def not CS) and the second line remained Papyrus.

I see what you are doing now. Yes, I get the same results if I do this.

Graham

EDIT: I guess the question is whether it is designed to work this way! Personally I think it is a good way of working.

Kevin Becker

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/275398#Comment_275398

EDIT: I guess the question is whether it is designed to work this way! Personally I think it is a good way of working.

I think so too, otherwise personal books would be font chaos compared to Logos editions.

M G Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/275399#Comment_275399

Further experimentation suggests that the situation is more complex than first appears.

Kevin is correct in that if you change the font used in Word as the 'normal' font then this is ignored in the Personal book and the font selected under Logos Program Settings is used. However, if the headings styles in Word are properly based on the 'normal' font then two things can happen when the Personal book is compiled: 1) if Times New Roman is used as 'normal' then the font in the PB headings changes to that in Program Settings, or, 2) if some other font is used for 'normal' then that font is retained in the headings.

Remember that I started this thread by saying that I wanted the font used in PBs to be determined by L4 Program Settings. It appears that if the 'normal' font used in Word is Times New Roman then all text in the compiled PB will display according to Program Settings, however, if some other font is used for 'normal' then the body text goes one way and the headings another!

It also appears that other settings of the Word 'normal' style, like paragraph spacing are ignored, however, changes made to the heading styles are retained.

One further thought. In Program Settings it is also possible to set preferred fonts for different for Greek, Hebrew and Syriac, and transliteration fonts for these languages. That suggests there may be some way to mark text in these languages so that the font used in Word can be ignored and that specified under Program Settings used.

Kevin Becker

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/275669#Comment_275669

MG, interesting observations. I've just confirmed them with my own experiment. I wonder if this should be considered a bug. If the Heading font is the same as the normal font then I would think Logos should subject it to the programs settings.

I know that you can specify the language of text in Word... I wonder if doing this would cause the PB tool to use the language font settings in Logos.

M G Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/275681#Comment_275681

A further twist.

I notice that when I have a PB open alongside a 'regular' L4 title, that the font size and the line spacing in the regular book were both different from the PB. I tried changing the 'normal' settings in my source .docx so that the body text was 14 point but this was again ignored on compiling. The body text of the PB is definitely smaller than that of the randomly chosen 'regular' book. I have already seen that making other changes to the 'normal' style do not find their way into the PB.

It may be that further functionality is coming in future releases but it would certainly be helpful if any Logos staff could comment on what does, and what does not affect the 'look' of a compiled PB. In other words, what is worth working on in the source .docx, and what will be ignored on compiling?

Added: If the font size is changed, not in the style setting, but by highlighting a section of text and then selecting a different font size from the toolbar, then when compiled that does show up as different!

Similarly, if, for example, the paragraph spacing settings are changed (again not by changing the style) then that change also shows up in the compiled PB.

It thus appears that, at least for body text, any settings in the Word style will be ignored on compiling, but settings changed on the face of the document, so to speak, are reflected in the compiled PB. That surely must be a BUG!

M G Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/275706#Comment_275706

The plot thickens!

In the page which Graham links above, in the last entry, Tonya wrote that at the time of writing: "There is a bug in here somewhere. We're trying to track down if it is
in the default settings for Word or in the preset Styles or somewhere
else."

It would appear that the problem may still lie between the software used to create the source document and how the PB compiler recognises/handles that document.

In what I have written above, I was using Word 2000 SP1 which I recently updated to SP3 and then added the File Format Converter Pack. However, I have just tried again, this time using Libre Office 3.3. I took my source .docx, exported into .rtf, closed the document, opened the .rtf and savd it as .docx (indeed as a Microsoft Word 2007 XML (.docx) since this is one of the two .docx formats that Libre Office offers to save to).

Using this Libre Office version of my source .docx file I can make changes to the 'Default' style and see these reflected in the compiled PB (specifically I changed paragraph spacing and also font size). However, any 'Heading 1' style in a Libre Office document is not recognised, neither those already in the document nor new ones created within Libre Office, and thus do not show up in the table of contents generated by the PB.

Hopefully this info will help developers resolve the problem (if they read it, of course).

Bohuslav Wojnar

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/275751#Comment_275751

In my experience so far (I use MS Word 2010) the font size is correct if I use in Normal Style Times New Roman font and 12p size. In one document however it keeps font much smaller and I was not able to track down the reason.

EDITED: I experimented a little bit and found in some situations it just gives us small font, no matter what you do in the original document. I use default Normal style, 12p size and in one book I get it working OK, in other one it just comes with the small font. I tried to change the size of the page (from A5 to A4), margins, many other settings and it just keeps giving the small font. It looks like a bug to me.