Passages and DOC: spacing issues and issues with poetry layout

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These are requests just in from Susan Q - she has received concerns from the field about DOC output problems when printing ULB material (in any language). There are frustrating problems with poetry and paragraph format - one in docx output and one in PDF output. Some of these spacing issues could cause serious problems in understanding the resulting printed text, because the spacing issue causes words to run together and look like different words.

First issue: Poetry/quoted Scripture problems in docx output (compare the attached images of docx & PDF output)

In the PDF output, the poetry/quoted Scripture looks beautiful. The \q and \q2 markers produce what they are supposed to produce. (Please see 1 Peter 1:24 and 1 Peter 2:6 in the attached PDF output file and consider it as a model.)

However, in the docx output (see green highlights and pink highlights in the attached docx output file), there is only vertical space before the poetry/quoted Scripture - docx output does not indent the poetry/quoted Scripture at \q and also not only doesn’t further indent \q2 but ignores line breaks and in fact takes out all space there. So if there is no punctuation, it can be especially bad - see verse 8 (looks like “stumblingand” is all one word). This affects understanding of the text - it just smushes words together in English in a confusing way but could potentially create a whole different word in another language by that smushing together - and it happens in all docx output of poetry/quoted Scripture. This bug with formatting \q2, especially, needs to be fixed as soon as possible in docx output.

Second issue: Line break difference between docx and PDF output - PDF makes a flush left line break whenever it changes between chunks

You will see in the “Lines all run in” image from docx output that all of 1 Peter 1 looks like 3 normal, proper paragraphs. All the lines are full-length.

However, in the PDF output (see blue highlights), there is a new flush-left line within a paragraph any time a new chunk happens there, leaving a short line just above it. There’s no extra vertical space, but it not only looks weird - it also frustrates people on the field, because it looks to them like a new paragraph is happening in a place where they did not indicate a new paragraph, and where a new paragraph should not occur. This could affect understanding in some language contexts, as well.

Third issue: Verse marker spacing (again)

In both the PDF and the docx output, there continue to be apparent spacing issues - no space seems to be before verse markers (that’s still happening - the attached was done in dev). Those spacing issues are highlighted in yellow in both the PDF output image and the docx output image attached. We are trying to teach people to make their BTT Writer placement of verse markers consistent, and this frustrates those efforts because verse markers that are treated the same way produce two different kinds of spacing.

An extra thing that’s always bugged me - because you might be changing format around \q and \q2, anyway (so maybe you could fix it, too?) - and because people on the field are concerned about wasted space/paper - is there a compelling reason why we have an extra line space after poetry? It looks ugly and wastes space. (See attached photo of a regular Bible page, with no extra line space after poetry.) This change definitely takes lower priority, though.