[XeTeX] Parallel texts

[John Was]

Hi

I use plain TeX rather than LaTeX, but I see that there is a LaTeX-friendly 
version of Edmac, which I have used quite often for critical editions - with 
up to four different categories of footnote material, each formatted 
differently (Edmac will allow you to specify more than that if required - up 
to 255 in fact!).

There may be something of help at:

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/ledmac/

Parallel texts are a difficult problem, though, and I'm not aware of any way 
of automating the process, though I would be extremely interested if someone 
has figured it out.  When I have had parallel verse texts to typeset I have 
set them independently, then I have decided which of the two texts is the 
'main' one (usually to fall on the even-numbered left-hand pages) and I have 
allowed that to paginate naturally in TeX.  I have then inserted forced 
pagebreaks at the points where this text is breaking naturally, and after 
that I have had the very tedious job of chopping up the parallel 
(right-hand) text manually and putting it in between the forced page-breaks: 
at least with verse texts one has forced line-breaks and it is relatively 
simple to keep the two in parallel.  There are severe problems if the 
'minor' text that is being cut up and inserted happens to be longer at some 
point than the 'major' text - one has to fiddle around moving annotation 
from one side to the other, then rerunnig TeX to see if it has come out 
right (the opposite of what one should be doing with a non-WYSIWYG system 
like TeX).

I have managed to do prose texts too (usually foreign language on the 
left-hand page, English translation on the right), but I think there is a 
basic problem about automating the procedure since it is virtually 
impossible to tell TeX how to keep a prose text and its translation running 
along in harmony.  It might be possible to link pairs of paragraphs (foreign 
and translation) and do something creative with a macro, but I think some 
manual intervention would be inevitable.

I am experimenting at the moment with a system whereby all the annotation in 
a medieval Latin prose text is repeated in the parallel English translation, 
except that in the English text it is initially suppressed (instead of 
outputting a footnote it merely outputs the cue, so that the Latin and 
English each have cues but only the Latin is outputting the note).  The idea 
is that if on some pairs of pages there is a serious imbalance (because of 
heavy annotation), I can suppress the note on the Latin side and output it 
on the English side instead:  essentially, what I want to achieve is the 
double-page spread (even plus facing odd page) becoming the unit of 
pagination, but as just described I am having to achieve this effect 
artificially.  If someone can think of a way to make TeX think of the 
page-spread as the unit of pagination, but still output pages singly in the 
usual way while producing the PDF, I'd be glad to hear about it!

Good luck in any case.  Edmac is certainly worth looking at - a brilliant 
package.


John
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Anas Ghrab" <anas.ghrab at saramusik.org>
To: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
Sent: Sunday, June 03, 2007 3:10 PM
Subject: JunkEmail: [XeTeX] (no subject)


> Is there a way to use arabxelatex for making parallel texts in a
> critical edition ?
>
> Thanks,
>
> ---
> Anas Ghrab
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