Re: Create in Org a bilingual book with facing pages

[Hendursaga <hendursaga@aol.com>]

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

> 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.

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.

> 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.

To clarify: you mean that you would have to have two distinct documents so that, say, the page titles, fonts, indices, etc can be specific to that "language half" of a work? I would've thought you could just have everything in one document. That's how I've been (trying to) do it so far, using the reledpar package, an extension of reledmac. Did you / have you tried using that? I've also tried various other packages, like the parallel package.

> 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[...]

I've looked at reledmac, and I agree, it is pretty sophisticated. Can you clarify which synchronization method(s) you use? If you do use reledpar, in section 6.2.2, it lists the different ways you can synchronize. Otherwise, could you try to explain in terms it uses?

> 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. [...]

To clarify once more: when you introduce page-specific commands, is this in the original PDF documents that you generate, or are those, like, trimmed and then you add on the headers etc later, or what?

> And that’s it. The next challenge for this fall is going to be a trilingual edition of the New Testament (Greek, Latin, Spanish). [...]

Are you aware of Kevin Klement's trilingual edition[1] of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus? (OK, it's technically bilingual, but with two separate English translations along with the original German!) He uses PHP (gross, I know!) to collate everything into a LaTeX document to then generate the various final versions. Besides the PHP, you might pick up a technique or two! (Or three!)

~ Hendursaga

[1] https://people.umass.edu/klement/tlp/