PE 6.0 environment variable APTFMTLINEPEN use.

BobSpangenburg · ‎Mar 12, 2015

Hi ADEPTers,

I'm in the process of upgrading my Arbortext Editor/PE/CPA system to 6.0 M090. The system is quite customized, but that's beside the point. One of the things that PTC mentions within the Release Notes for CPA 1.6 M030 is that one must re-baseline all your documents. We don't have that luxury.

With that said, I'm working on making the new system produce the same output as the 5.3 M060/CPA 1.4 F000 system has been doing. I'm doing well except that I find that every once in a while, a paragraph or table column is breaking slightly different. Instead of "in-struction" at the end of a line, I get "instruc-tion". Though still correct, the difference flows through the paragraph to where the last line may be pulled up. This in turn, causes an extraline available on the page allowing a line from the next page to roll to this page.

After some intense digging, I found that the CPA code (_cpa_driver.acl) is testing to see if the current version is5.4 F000 or higher. If it is, the code changes the environment variable "APTFMTLINEPEN" from the default of "20" to "140". The only explaination for varialbe I've found was with the changeas follows: "The only difference is in the linepenalty: 20 vs 140. The latter is used to force paragraphs to the minimum possible length. This is needed if line breaks are forced."

The obvious is to disable this code. When I do so, I can compose from the 6.0 Editor and get an exact replica of the document produced by5.3. However, when I send the document to 6.0 PE,I get the "bad" paragraph.

My question is: "Why is this setting not being seen by PE?" I've set the envirnonment variable on the server, as well as set the value directly within an init file.

Secondly, does anyone know what exactly this environment variable is supposed to do, as well as whether or not there's a way to get around this.

Thanks,

Bob

ptc-1908075 · ‎Mar 12, 2015

Hi Bob,
I don't know why the environment variable isn't working in PE. However, I think that if you put:

\linepenalty=20

in a .tmx file, it will restore the previous behavior.From The TeXbook,Chapter 14: How TEX BreaksParagraphs into Lines:

"Herelis the current value of \linepenalty, a parameter that can be increased if you wantTEX to try harder to keep all paragraphs to the minimum number of lines; plain TEX sets\linepenalty=10."

Good luck!Suzanne Napoleonwww.FOSIexpert.com"WYSIWYG is last-century technology!"

naglists · ‎Mar 12, 2015

My only thoughts are at the "is it plugged in" level.

You've restarted Tomcat under PE, yes?

Have you tried capturing the value of the environment variable and printing
it to be sure PE is actually seeing it?

On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 12:03 PM, Bob Spangenburg <-<br/>> wrote:

> Hi ADEPTers,
>
> I'm in the process of upgrading my Arbortext Editor/PE/CPA system to 6.0
> M090. The system is quite customized, but that's beside the point. One of
> the things that PTC mentions within the Release Notes for CPA 1.6 M030 is
> that one must re-baseline all your documents. We don't have that luxury.
>
> With that said, I'm working on making the new system produce the same
> output as the 5.3 M060/CPA 1.4 F000 system has been doing. I'm doing well
> except that I find that every once in a while, a paragraph or table column
> is breaking slightly different. Instead of "in-struction" at the end of a
> line, I get "instruc-tion". Though still correct, the difference flows
> through the paragraph to where the last line may be pulled up. This in
> turn, causes an extra line available on the page allowing a line from the
> next page to roll to this page.
>
> After some intense digging, I found that the CPA code (_cpa_driver.acl) is
> testing to see if the current version is 5.4 F000 or higher. If it is, the
> code changes the environment variable "APTFMTLINEPEN" from the default of
> "20" to "140". The only explaination for varialbe I've found was with the
> change as follows: "The only difference is in the linepenalty: 20 vs 140.
> The latter is used to force paragraphs to the minimum possible length. This
> is needed if line breaks are forced."
>
> The obvious is to disable this code. When I do so, I can compose from the
> 6.0 Editor and get an exact replica of the document produced by 5.3.
> However, when I send the document to 6.0 PE, I get the "bad" paragraph.
>
> My question is: "Why is this setting not being seen by PE?" I've set the
> envirnonment variable on the server, as well as set the value directly
> within an init file.
>
> Secondly, does anyone know what exactly this environment variable is
> supposed to do, as well as whether or not there's a way to get around this.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Bob
>