Hello
I will keep an eye on this thread since paired texts and translations pretty
well test TeX to the limit, and I have two of these beasts on my desk at the
moment. I have typeset some extensive editions of Latin prose texts with
facing translation using plain (Xe)TeX and the edmac package, but the
slowest part of the operation has been the balancing of the various banks of
annotation over the facing-page spread. My approach has been to keep the
app.crit annotation on the Latin side only and to duplicate the editorial
annotation in both the Latin and English files. I then decide, on a
page-pair by page-pair basis, whether the Latin or the English side should
bear a given note (it's easy enough to have a switch which suppresses or
output the note, with the note-cue being given in both the Latin and the
English for the convenience of those reading in either language). One gets
quite adept at it by the time one has reached page 500 or so, but it's never
going to be a quick process, and is counter-TeX in the sense that one really
wants to see on screen what will happen as one goes along, rather than
recompiling the file after each page-spread and then viewing the PDF, which
is what I do. (One thing that helps is to have the English capable of
squeezing up its \baselineskip so that the English, which tends to be
wordier than the Latin, can be accommodated on the page without getting out
of step with the Latin.)
The problems would if anything be tougher to solve with the translation
beneath the original on the same page - again it's the sort of thing one
would want to manage on screen. (Though a few hundred years ago skilled
compositors could do it by eye: I have a Variorum edition of Euripides with
each page displaying the Greek text, the ancient scholia (commentary)
beneath, textual variants beneath that, and then a Latin translation,
followed by two-column editorial notes cued to lines of the Greek text.)
With prose one is surely always going to require human intervention as
someone who knows the original language will have to decide where to make
the corresponding page break in the translation. But with verse which has
an accompanying line-by-line translation there is perhaps more hope:
\pairedtext{Arma uirumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris}{I sing of arms
and the man, who first from the shores of Troy} could probably be
interpreted as 'Set the Latin line and give the English line as the first
bank of footnote material on the same page'. With a bit of ingenuity the
edmac package could probably be pressed into service for this.
The problem with facing-page prose editions, it has always seemed to me, is
that one wants to be able to tell TeX to use the page-spread, and not the
page, as its unit for deciding on what annotation will fit. It might just
about be possible to persuade it to typeset in two columns in A3 landscape
as a first operation - perhaps with the right-hand side left blank (apart
from any notes that are called to the foot from the left-hand original text)
for the corresponding translation to be pasted in once one sees where the
page-breaks fall? Then one could go through imposing manual page breaks and
resetting with the pagination parameters restored to normal portrait
page-by-page setting, but with this time with the page-breaks imposed on TeX
from what has been seen in the initial A3 landscape setting.
But there are so many ifs and buts about this that my brain has always given
up when I have tried to grapple with the issues involved - I'd certainly be
interested to see whether others manage to crack it (particularly with plain
XeTeX).
I'd better not ramble on any further - but I thought it might be useful to
set out some of the issues as I see them.
Good luck!
John
duplicate the annotation in both the La
- Original Message -
From: "Juan Acevedo"
To:
Sent: 03 February 2013 12:10
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] typesetting original with translation on top and bottom
Hi Adam,
Some time ago I fancied that something similar, some sort of complex Talmud
layout, might be achieved using Nicola Talbot's flowfram.sty. If I remember
well, she was optimistic about the possibility, but then I never went ahead
with it. Maybe you can explore that route.
There is also what people have used to do some impressive critical editions
with several layers of footnotes and whatnot: ledmac and ledpar, now
revamped and renamed to eledmac and eledpar, methinks.
I hope these pointers help. I'd be very interested to know how you solve
this and I'd be happy to try and help, at least doing testing if you need
to.
Juan
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