[texhax] How to reverse the columns in "twocolumn" layout?

[Donald Arseneau]

Tigran Aivazian <tigran at bibles.org.uk> writes:

> I would like to use "twocolumn" option for my Hebrew and other Semitic Bible
> editions (e.g. Syriac, Aramaic etc) which are written right-to-left, but the
> problem of "twocolumn" is that it starts from the left column whereas I need
> it to start the page from the right column.
> 
> Is there any way to tell XeLaTeX to do this? I looked at the "*dblcolumn*
> routines in base/latex.ltx but cannot figure out how to do this.

It is quite easy.  Copy out the \@outputdblcol definition from latex.ltx,
and put it in a .sty (or .cls) file, then, in your copy, exchange the two
lines
                             \box\@leftcolumn \hss}%
and
                             \box\@outputbox \hss}%


You should also declare \@mparswitchtrue.


Correction on my simple exchange above!  I realize that will put
the auxiliary file entries in the wrong order, so, for example, 
bibTeX may get the numbering wrong, and toc entries will be out
of order.

A more thorough redefinition (again, untested) is (part of
\@outputdblcol)

   \setbox\@outputbox \vbox {%
                         \hb at xt@\textwidth {%
                           \kern\textwidth \kern-\columnwidth  %**
                           \hb at xt@\columnwidth {%
                             \box\@leftcolumn \hss}%
                           \kern-\textwidth %**
                           \hfil
                           {\normalcolor\vrule \@width\columnseprule}%
                           \hfil
                           \kern-\textwidth  %**
                           \hb at xt@\columnwidth {%
                             \box\@outputbox \hss}%
                           \kern-\columnwidth \kern\textwidth %**
                                             }%
                              }%
    \@combinedblfloats


(All repositioning is done with \kern and marked with %**)


-- 
Donald Arseneau                          asnd at triumf.ca