Re: Parallel text on two pages

[Oliver Bandel]

On Wed, 22 Aug 2001, Valeriy E. Ushakov wrote:

[...]
> 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.

column-alignment in (La)TeX would be answered with parallel.sty.

But across-pages-alignment seems to be much harder.

But isn't it a recursive problem?

If these are columns or pages doesn't matter, if they would be handled
in the same manner - each with some special way of processing
(can we call it methods?!).

And when we are at that point, we could think about section-
alignment, or chapter-alignment, or whole-text-alignment
(when we can put pages into pages, we should be able to 
align complete-texts with complete-texts...).

And we can go further with this...


If we go in the other direction and thgrow away current
Lout-layout-algorithms, we do not only see words as objects,
we can see characters as objects -> and then can use the
layouting algorithms character-wise, not only word-wise.
(Adding individual spacing (\kern in TeX) would produce
TeX-like typography-results).


This would be nearly perfect: alignment from any page to
any other page or any paragraph to any other paragraph
or pages and paragraphs or complete-texts and individual
letters or ... ... ... ...


-> No problem to have @Language de {"Registerhaltigkeit"}.

-> No problem to have the cross-pages alignment.

-> No problem to have any other layout problem from the
   software itself

-> have a lot more problems in finding the right rules,
   because the focus is not, how to get the program
   acchieving the known rules, but rather to find the
   coorect rules, the syntax and grammar of good/practical
   typography...


Ciao,
   Oliver