[pdftex] Two column Greek / English

[Michael Chapman]

On Saturday 07 July 2007 9:52 am, Richard Davies wrote:
> Trouble is the left hand column must be in Greek and the right hand column
> in English.

I tried various approaches to a similar problem -that is typesetting parallel 
translations.
Because I wished to keep each paragraph opposite the corresponding paragraph, 
I ran a system that made a PDF for each paragraph. I then assembled these 
'images' so that they fell neatly against each other.

(So this doe creep back onto the PDF list ....).

Problems were:
	It was slow: 'cooking' several hundred PDFs and assembling them
		into one file was best left to run overnight.
	Multiple inclusion of the same fonts. I've already discussed this
		on this list (but I used a PDF ->-PS->-PDF route to
		clean out the multiple embeddings (at one per paragraph it 
		is significant!)).
	I had short paragraphs, and the text itself was translated statute law,
		so it was acceptable to break each page at the nearest 
		paragraph ending (also the paragraphs were as
		I said, short). It may look messy for a novel!
	(For the same reason I had to cut each ITEM of itemized lists
		into a single PDF file (and make sure they indented
		properly).

Improvements:
	I have seen it suggested that one should adjust textwidth to try and keep 
the vertical height used by different languages the same (to stop annoying 
vertical spaces). Certainly adjusting font size looks very messy (lines no 
longer align).

Would say that if you want a simple, if slow solution that requires little 
knowledge of 'all the underlying stuff' then moving blocks of PDF as images 
around gives very neat results.

Michael