Re: Parallel text on two pages

[Valeriy E. Ushakov]

On Sun, Aug 19, 2001 at 02:04:43 +0200, Oliver Bandel wrote:

> is it possible to set text on two pages in parallel?

For two pages, i.e. a "spread" the problem is hard to solve, since the
spread is just two unrelated pages.  In other words, Lout doesn't know
that these two pages will eb aligned horizontally in the final book.

For two columns an over-simplistic approach is:

    def @EnPlace { @Galley }
    def @DePlace { @Galley }
    
    def @En into { @EnPlace && preceding }
      right @Body
    { @Body }
    
    def @De into { @DePlace && preceding }
      right @Body
    { @Body }
    
    def @Bilingual
    {
        3i @Wide @EnPlace ||1i 3i @Wide @DePlace @NotRevealed
        // @Bilingual
    }

With usage like:

    @Bilingual

    // @En { ... }
    // @De { ... }

    // @En { ... }
    // @De { ... }

(in real package you would take care of hiding syntactic warts like //
with a macro etc.)


The problem with this is that paragraphs can't flow into the next
page, since the way 

    3i @Wide @EnPlace ||1i 3i @Wide @DePlace

are concatenated prevents it.

I'm not sure if it's possible to overcome this.  Basicly it requires a
way to preserve horiziontal alignment across galleys so that it's
possible to "synchronize" two columns.  Lout can do this for vertical
direction (algined displays is an example), but I'm not sure you can
do this for horizonal direction.  May you can use another clever
trick, I don't know.

SY, Uwe
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