Re: [Groff] parallel text processing ; vertical and horizontal mode

[E. Hoffmann]

Wed, 06 Sep 2017 17:36:34 +0100 (Ralph Corderoy <address@hidden> ):
> Hi Erich,

Hi Ralph!  Thank you for looking into it.

> > Moreover, is a thing possible not to have vertical columns, but
> > horizontal texts, above and below, like
> >
> > page 1               page 2
> >
> > aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa      ...aaaaaaaaaaaa
> > aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...   aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
> > ---------------      ---------------
> > bbbbbbbbbbbbbbb      ...bbbbbbbbbbbb
> > bbbbbbbbbbbbbbb...   bbbbbbbbbbbbbbb
>
> So aaa is the English, bbb is the French?

Exactly.  I saw this once in a GDR (German Democratic Republic)
edition of Johann Baptist Fischart "Affentheuerliche und
ungeheuerliche Geschichtschrift vom Leben, Rhaten und Thaten...", AKA
"Naupengeheurliche Geschichtklitterung" (1577) which is a translation
of Francois Rabelais "Gargantua" and "Pantagruel".  Fischarts German
is *really* difficult to read, perhaps even more so than Rabelais'
French, because of the 'nonlinear' (so to say) development of the
German language.  Thus, "aaa" was the text, and "bbb" the commentary.
Which burns down to English and French.  You see, it isn't all only
my fantasy.

> Does the "half way" line vary
> in distance down each page depending which language is the more volumous
> for those passages?

I didn't think that far, thinking to solve the problem by choosing
a different pointsize for each of the text corpora like in that
Fischart Edition.  Of corse it would be a hypertrophy changeing the
distances each and every page...no, the idea is to have two parts of
text on each page.

> Should the next page be automatically started when
> the total height of the two languages' passages fills the page?

Well, yes, that is to say, eventually both texts are more or less of
the same length, but in the process of writing text aaa may be a lot
longer than bbb, and if the output could show the aaa series just on
it's side of the page, it would be of great help.

   The more I think of it, thanks to your good questions, the more I am
asking myself whether the vertical solution (in the sense of the tex
"parallel" package) might not be the better one.  Both texts run their
columns regardless of one another, the width of the columns and/or the
pointsizes are easily adjusted, so, ...

Thanks!

Erich

ps.

   My idea was to write a text and a sub-text, sub="under", like a
translation from a "prosaic" version to a "poetic" version of the
same thought, one underlying the other.  These times I am working
on "translations".  No text can be translated to another language
without losing something, there are, if I am not wrong, roughly 60<
translations of Shakespeare's Sonnets into German.  I am in the process
of translating something, and this time I tend to write 2 translations,
a "prosaic" one and a "poetic" one.  Hence the question.  Nothing is
easy...


> --
> Cheers, Ralph.
> https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy


--

"Let's not make bad things worse."