We provide an introductory tutorial slide set demonstrating some simple additions to a pre-existing configuration file. For some example XML illustrating various aspects of the schema (particularly UI features), we also provide a .zip file (for PTP release 5.0.1).
The preference options are aids for debugging configuration changes. The first turns off configuration file caching. This will ensure that when you make changes to the configuration, they will automatically be picked up by PTP.
The other options are useful if you are writing a new stream tokenizer for a command; checking all four options usually produces quite a bit of output, so in that case it may be advisable to log the results to a file rather than stdout (at any rate the latter would be available only if PTP were running as an application within the Eclipse IDE platform, which is not the case for those modifying the XML simply from within the PTP package installation workspace).