Re: Create in Org a bilingual book with facing pages

["Juan Manuel Macías" <maciaschain@posteo.net>]

Hendursaga writes:

> I'll look through that page sometime! As for your favorites, I already
> have some of them on my lists, but I'll look at the others!

There are also the Renaissance editions, especially those by Aldo
Manuzio or Robert Estienne, which are true works of art. One of my free
time projects is trying to reproduce with LuaTeX an edition of Aldo
Manuzio (including the imperfections), but since I have less and less
free time in my life it is a project that is on the dead track
indefinitely :-)

> Have you done any works that are parallel / bilingual that parallel,
> paracol, or whatnot would probably be sufficient?

When I have tried to do something in real production with these packages
I have always had some problem. But I have done many tests with less
complex text and they do not work badly. Especially paracol, which is
based on multicol.

>> [...] For critical editions (among other text types for Humanities),
>> the standard for storing textual data is TEI
>> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_Encoding_Initiative). The
>> problem with TEI (at least for me) is that it consists of XML, and I
>> hate XML :-). In this regard, I think that a lightweight markup
>> language as powerful as Org could be a good alternative to TEI. And
>> Org is indeed human-readable. One could even think of a possible Org
>> backend for TEI...
>
> I also hate XML, but that's mostly when aiming for 100% compliance. A
> lot of features I really don't care for, and I really think the
> namespacing could've been much simpler, but with a superior editor
> like Emacs or perhaps a specialized one, I'd like to think much of the
> chore of TEI goes away..

Yeah, TEI has become, whether we like it or not, the standard for the
transmission of texts in the digital Humanities. Certainly a TEI-mode
for Emacs, or even a TEI backend for Org would be two wonderful things
if they existed. But I imagine it would also be a tremendous job to make
them exist :-)

> Question: have you looked at other (open-source) typesetting engines
> besides the TeX family? Like, say, *roff? In some ways, I prefer
> groff's way to TeX, but it being a much smaller community, with a much
> smaller ecosystem, gets in the way..

I did something with *roff, but it was a long time ago and nothing worth
remembering. I know *roff still has fans, and I remember seeing a
version out there that incorporates TeX's line break algorithms and has
support for opentype features. A kind of TeXroff, from what I
understand.

Most of my "typographical life" has revolved around TeX. But I entered
the world of TeX not through a standard TeX but through Omega, which was
an experimental version of TeX with Unicode support and a lot of very
sophisticated features, some of which not even LuaTeX has now by the
way, LuaTeX has taken a lot of ideas from Omega). Omega was fascinating,
but a horror to use. To install a TrueType font you had to go through a
few processes. Before using exclusively free software, I also used Adobe
Indesign quite a bit, and know it reasonably well. In fact InDesign has
also borrowed a lot from TeX.

Lately there have been some very interesting (and open source) projects
of new typesetting systems based on TeX but more modern. Among them, I
am very attracted to SILE (https://sile-typesetter.org/), and I have
played quite a lot with this system. It is written entirely in Lua and
supports multithreading. But this and other new projects have one major
problem (IMO): LaTeX. Or, rather, the absence of LaTeX. TeX and any
other typesetting system based on it is unusable as such. Its primitives
are a series of basic physical processes on the page. The good news is
that Knuth made TeX extensible (like Emacs) to be used through a
'format'. And LaTeX format, with its vast repertoire of macro packages,
has made TeX usable by a huge range of users. All those macro packages
are a job already done that nobody is going to be willing to do it
again. Therefore, I believe that any new typesetting system that is not
(in some way) compatible with LaTeX will unfortunately be doomed. The
alternative is that something modular and monolithic like ConTeXt might
emerge, but not with the richness and variety (sometimes excessive,
admittedly) of LaTeX.

Best regards,

Juan Manuel