Re: Create in Org a bilingual book with facing pages

[Christian Moe <mail@christianmoe.com>]

Hi, Juan Manuel,

I keep saving your messages with process documentation for future
reference should I ever attempt anything similar. Much appreciated!

Yours,
Christian

Juan Manuel Macías writes:

> Hi all,
>
> TL; DR:
>
> The bilingual critical edition (ancient Greek/Spanish) of the letters of
> Demosthenes and Aeschines has recently been published in Spain, a book
> whose production and typesetting I have taken charge of, using Org and
> Org-publish. Although I already have a long experience typesetting
> bilingual editions of a certain complexity, especially for philological
> use, I had never done it until now by centralizing the entire process in
> Org-Mode. I have to say that it has been a very interesting experience,
> so I leave here below a brief description of the process and some tips,
> in case they can be useful to someone who wants to prepare from Org
> bilingual texts with facing pages and certain complexity.
>
> BTW, Here’s a sample of two pages from the book:
>
> <https://i.imgur.com/XUOGEnf.png>
>
> Long version:
>
> First of all, for this kind of work you have to take into account an
> inherent limitation of TeX: the compilation process in TeX is a
> single-threaded process. That is, in TeX you cannot compile different
> parts of a document, with different configurations (= different
> preambles), at the same time. For example, you cannot have one
> configuration for odd pages and another for even pages (original and
> translation) and compile them in parallel and asynchronously. In Adobe
> InDesign-style DTP programs you can load multiple page threads in
> parallel, but these programs don’t have the typographic refinement of
> TeX. And besides, I never use proprietary software ;-).
>
> Therefore, to create a bilingual edition with facing pages, and for this
> particular type of book where the odd pages (the text in Greek) is a
> critical edition with a strong critical apparatus
> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_apparatus), it is necessary to
> compile two separate documents and then synchronize them. The good news:
> I have found that, thanks to Org, the process is much more streamlined
> and controlled.
>
> On the other hand, since in this book the content of the odd and even
> pages is variable, the synchronization has been done per page, so that
> the reader always obtains the same content on the odd and even page when
> facing the open book. For the Greek document I used the reledmac LaTeX
> package, which is the most mature LaTeX package for philological
> critical editions, but I used it through my org-critical-edition package
> (<https://gitlab.com/maciaschain/org-critical-edition>).
>
> Once both PDFs are obtained and synchronized, they are loaded into the
> master Org document using the pdfpages LaTeX package. Since it was
> necessary to introduce in certain pages some commands specific to each
> page, such as page styles, index entries or labels for references, and
> to avoid having to load the pages one by one with pdfpages commands, I
> wrote a function that obtains the number of pages of the synchronized
> PDF (via mutool) and it does all that work. The function has three
> arguments: the path to the synced PDF, the general page command, and a
> list of page numbers with particular commands (these last two arguments
> are optional). An example of use would be:
>
> ┌────
> │ (inserta-pdfpages-bi "resultado.pdf" "\\thispagestyle{plain}" '((2 "\\label{some-label}")))
> └────
>
> The function is evaluated in the master document within a source block:
>
> <https://i.imgur.com/yps6xRA.png>
>
> To compile the two PDFs separately and get the PDF in sync, I also do it
> from Org using a shell source block. So I have all PDFs always
> synchronized up to date. The synchronized PDF is obtained with pdftk:
>
> <https://i.imgur.com/qbSg2po.png>
>
> The rest of the book, introduction, indices, etc. it is normally done
> via Org publish. And the final compilation (the master document that
> includes all sub-documents) is done asynchronously using latexmk.
>
> And that’s it. The next challenge for this fall is going to be a
> trilingual edition of the New Testament (Greek, Latin, Spanish). My idea
> is to try to adapt to Org the use of the LaTeX package flowfram (an
> attempt to create dynamic indesign-style text boxes in LaTeX, but
> ---because of TeX's limitations--- they would not be asynchronous
> boxes). Then, each text in a language would go inside an org block.
> We'll see how it turns out :-)
>
> Best regards,
>
> Juan Manuel
>
> --