[XeTeX] typesetting original with translation on top and bottom

[John Was]

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" <juan.acevedo.juan at gmail.com>
To: <xetex at tug.org>
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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