Re: Parallel text on two pages

[Valeriy E. Ushakov]

On Tue, Aug 21, 2001 at 17:42:48 +0200, Oliver Bandel wrote:

> > 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.
> 
> Oh, I thought, Lout does not know "pages".

It really depends on the value of "knows".  Lout doesn't have a
*concept* of a page - it just replace top-level // operators with
"showpage" plus some DSC goo.

So the problem here is that you want a horizontal alignment between
objects concatenated with // (aka pages).

It *might* be possible to cheat and, say, print text 90 rotated
degrees on a landscape pages so that the alignment is vertical, or
printing spreads at once on A<n-1> paper, or some other clever hack.
But that's gonna be hard if at all possible.


> So I thought, it should be possible to relate two boxes
> with vertical distance, before the text will be put to
> the different pages....?

The question is "vertical distance from what?"  The example I posted
(btw, it works) relies on Lout alignment rules, but doing alignment
across pages is a very tricky thing.


> This seems to be a hard problem at all, because the problem -
> discussed in the german TeX-Mailinglist some days ago - has yielded
> a lot of questionmarks in the faces of the people there too...

I think I own only three books printed like that: Revised report on
Algol 68 (english/russian) - the only one aligned across pages - and
Kalevala (finnish/russian) and 4 Gospels (old church slavonic/russian)
- aligned across two columns on a page.

SY, Uwe
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