Re: Create in Org a bilingual book with facing pages

[Hendursaga <hendursaga@aol.com>]

Juan Manuel Macías <maciaschain@posteo.net> writes:

>> What is the name of this book / the publisher's page? I don't really know Spanish, and only a little Greek, but I'm fascinated by bilingual editions, especially with critical apparati. I've been looking for a workflow for creating my own (possibly critical) bilingual works, but so far, months later, I haven't really found anything satisfactory.
>
> Demóstenes y Esquines, Cartas atribuidas. Publisher: Dykinson.
>
> Perhaps it is not yet in the catalog, because the book is very recent.

Yeah, it doesn't appear to be in the catalog just yet. I'll look for it again sometime later!

> On this page you can see other critical editions (among other books) that I have produced: https://maciaschain.gitlab.io/lunotipia/muestra_trabajos.html. Certainly critical editions are some of the most fascinating kinds of books out there. My favorites are the Oxford Classical Texts, the Budé Collection, and Teubner. In bilingual format the Loeb Classical Texts are also excellent. All these have marked a canon.

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!

> I think that the automatic synchronization of the facing pages of a bilingual editions, either in TeX or in any other software, is a utopia.

I was beginning to think even state-of-the-art isn't sufficient yet :-/

> In the case of TeX/LaTeX, the single-thread TeX limitation is also added. Packages like parallel (or paracol, which is newer) work fine when dealing with simple text. At more complexity they are unusable. And furthermore, in this case text A is a critical edition that needs its own configuration. Parallel or paracol simply don't work here.

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

> You might also want to take a look at ekdosis, a new package for critical editions. It is not as complete as reledmac (for now), but it has some interesting features, such as the possibility of exporting to TEI.

Ah! I had that somewhere in my bookmarks; now that I have more knowledge on TEI, I might take a closer look! I would've thought importing TEI as opposed to exporting would be the easier / better way, though..

> [...] 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..

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..

Cheers,
Hendursaga