text and translation on facing pages

Everything related to our flagship word processor.
Post Reply
mfrance
Posts: 9
Joined: 2007-10-12 08:42:16
Location: Italy

text and translation on facing pages

Post by mfrance »

I’m translating a poem made up of about 650 stanzas. The publisher asked me to set up the work so to have original text and translation on facing pages, i.e. the text on left (even) pages and the translation on right (odd) pages.
Is there a way to have the two parts running indipendently one from the other on alternate pages in the same file?
“Synchronizing” the two parts, i.e. having each pair of facing pages starting with the same stanza (its original text on the left page and the translation on the right one) is not a problem: I can do it manually.
The best solution I could conceive for now is writing the original text and the translation on two separate documents (manually synchronized); then create two separate pdf files; and finally combine (“interweave”?) the two files, in order to have each page of the original text file followed by the matching page of the translation file. Still, before creating the pdf, I need to number the pages of the first file only with even page numbers, the second file only with odd numbers. Is there a trick to do that?

Marco
User avatar
greenmorpher
Posts: 767
Joined: 2007-04-12 04:01:46
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Contact:

Re: text and translation on facing pages

Post by greenmorpher »

M. France

This is madness, of course; it should be done in a layout program. :o

However, as you surmise, you can do it in NWPro (or any other WP) and stitch it together quite simply in a PDF program such as PDFpen (the plain PDFpen, you don't need the Pro which costs twice as much) AND have the correct pages numbers by following these steps:

1) Set up two parallel documents, one of them one language and the otherthe other language. Say English and French just for discussion.

2) Add page numbers in the normal way in both documents.

3) Decide which is the primary language. It will have odd numbers, the right hand pages. The secondary language will have even numbers, the left hand pages.

4) Start the primary language document on page 1 with the titles and what not IN BOTH LANGUAGES, then insert two page breaks to get an empty page 2 and to start the text proper on page 3, and so forth. Start the secondary language document with a page break on page 1 so the text starts on page 2, at the bottom of that text insert two page breaks so it leaves page 3 blank and skips to page 4, and so on.

5) In the end, print both documents to PDF.

6) Buy PDFpen (http://www.smileonmymac.com/PDFpen/index.html) and open the primary language PDF file. Then add the secondary language PDF file at ther end of that.

7) Finally, progressively discard the blank pages and drag pages from the secondary file up to their correct position. This sounds as though it would take a long time, but in practice, you'll complete the task in minutes, especially if you have the file set up to show facing pages.

8) Save as.

Best of luck!

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard
Publisher, Editor, Business Writer
The Worsley Press

Get "Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes?" to deliver your words with real zing; and "How to Start and Produce a Magazine or Newsletter" to learn to step safely in the publishing minefield. Amazon or www.worsleypress.com
Groucho
Posts: 497
Joined: 2007-03-03 09:55:06
Location: Europe

Re: text and translation on facing pages

Post by Groucho »

Best choice a dtp program. I'd take a look at Scribus (http://www.scribus.net). It's a bit quirky about the fonts, but it's free.

Cheers, Henry.
mfrance
Posts: 9
Joined: 2007-10-12 08:42:16
Location: Italy

Re: text and translation on facing pages

Post by mfrance »

Thank so much, Geoff and Henry!
I’ll first try the “long track” suggested by Geoff: so much work already done with NisusPro (formatting, comments, cross-references, etc.) I’d hate to lose!
If this becames too tortuous, I’ll resort to a DTP. I’m a bit scared about this, however.
Not so much because of fonts. Though the primary language is Sanskrit, no Indic (complex) script is involved: the text will be printed in transliteration, and I’m just using characters taken from the Latin Extended and Latin Additional Unicode blocks (which, I think, every DTP application can easily handle).
But both the text and translation pages have footnotes: critical apparatus and explicative notes respectively (I use footnotes just to force things to appear on the same page; note numbers are actually in white colour, so they won’t show in print). I remember that years ago most DTP (I worked with Quark XPress and Page Maker) used to behave weirdly when handling footnotes: but since then time has passed, and things are surely changed (improved, I hope!)

Many thanks,

Marco
capvideo
Posts: 21
Joined: 2008-03-16 16:41:16
Contact:

Re: text and translation on facing pages

Post by capvideo »

For interleaving two PDF files, Mac OS X has this built in through Automator. In the PDF library of Automator, look for "Combine PDF Pages". The option "Shuffling Pages" will cause it to combine two PDF files by taking one page from each document in order. I've used it for printing half of pages upside down, though I can't remember why I needed that.

Jerry
Groucho
Posts: 497
Joined: 2007-03-03 09:55:06
Location: Europe

Re: text and translation on facing pages

Post by Groucho »

The last version of Preview, the one coming with Leopard, allows one to move, add and delete pages within a pdf. I found that out time ago, when I mistakingly dragged a thumbnail.

Greetings, Henry.
mfrance
Posts: 9
Joined: 2007-10-12 08:42:16
Location: Italy

Re: text and translation on facing pages

Post by mfrance »

Many thanks to you all for your suggestions.
Even without a DTP, the work can be done as follows:
1. Work on a single NWP file, taking advantage of all the features offered by Nisus: just take care of “marking” the different parts of the work (text, translation, notes, and critical apparatus) applying different paragraph styles;
2. From this “root file” create two separate NWP files: text and critical apparatus in one file (that is, the content of left pages), translation and notes in the other one (right pages). This can be easily done through the NWP “Select all text in this style” command: by selecting the relevant paragraphs and pasting them into a new file; or selecting the unneeded paragraphs, deleting them, and saving what’s left to a new file. No need to number the pages at this stage;
3. Manually sinchronize the pages of the two files, in order to have text and translation proceeding at the same pace (this is surely the most boring and time-consuming task);
4. Create two PDF files from the RTF ones;
5. Interleave the two PDF files using Automator, as suggested by Jerry (it’s a great feature!);
6. Number the pages of the new, complete PDF file using Acrobat Pro (perhaps some cheaper application can do the work as well). The “Add headers and footers” command found in the “Documents” menu of AcrobatPro 7 lets you style the page numbers (font, dimension, etc.), and even assign different positions to the numbers in left and right pages.

Many thanks to you all!

Marco
User avatar
greenmorpher
Posts: 767
Joined: 2007-04-12 04:01:46
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Contact:

Re: text and translation on facing pages

Post by greenmorpher »

PDFpen can interleave pages fro mtwo PDF files, they do it with an AppleScript. Further, on my trials with two unequal length files, the AppleScript would run until if finished interleaving all that were available, then leave the remaining pages of the longer file tagged on to the end of the merged file. However, with I tested Preview's interleaving with two unequal length files, it wouldn't work.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard
Publisher, Editor, Business Writer
The Worsley Press

Get "Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes?" to deliver your words with real zing; and "How to Start and Produce a Magazine or Newsletter" to learn to step safely in the publishing minefield. Amazon or www.worsleypress.com
Groucho
Posts: 497
Joined: 2007-03-03 09:55:06
Location: Europe

Re: text and translation on facing pages

Post by Groucho »

Hi, Geoff

As far as I know Preview for Leopard allows one to add, remove or shuffle pages. I don't know that it does some interleaving. If you say it does so, and it does in a buggy or poor way, I believe you. After all I only stitched a group of pdf’s time ago, a simple addition without interleaving, and I did it with PdfLab, which I guess uses some form of a OS AppleScript.
Anyway, I think the better solution is a dtp program :) .

Cheers, Henry.
User avatar
greenmorpher
Posts: 767
Joined: 2007-04-12 04:01:46
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Contact:

Re: text and translation on facing pages

Post by greenmorpher »

I didn't say Preview couldn't do it or that it was buggy, rather that it could handle one frile having more pages than the other, it seemed, whereas the AppelScript working with PDFpen could do so.

Groucho sez:
Anyway, I think the better solution is a dtp program
I'm actually equivocal on this -- depending on the quality of the typesetting required -- given that the post processing in PDFpen to get the pages all together would be very quick.

With two files with half their pages blank, you would simply set up the thumbnails sized to make two columns, then select the blank ones and remove them at a stroke. Then save. You would then do the merge. Save As. Book ready.

If you set the thing up in Nisus with a good font or two and set it ragged right (i.e. you didn't use fully justified type where you would run into rubbish spacing and hyphenation problems) it could look pretty pleasant.

On the other hand, I wouldn't want to rwead a novel set ragged right.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard
Publisher, Editor, Business Writer
The Worsley Press

Get "Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes?" to deliver your words with real zing; and "How to Start and Produce a Magazine or Newsletter" to learn to step safely in the publishing minefield. Amazon or http://www.worsleypress.com
frisket
Posts: 1
Joined: 2018-10-23 03:18:40

Re: text and translation on facing pages

Post by frisket »

I'm sorry I'm coming late to this. Did you ever reach a conclusion?

I'm curious because I use LaTeX with the reledpar package, which lets you mark the paragraphs from each source, and automatically synchronises them, adding space below whichever paragraph is the shorter. I just finished a 270pp facing-page version of an early Irish document and it ran through perfectly first time.

P
Bob Stern
Posts: 170
Joined: 2006-03-12 12:32:47

Re: text and translation on facing pages

Post by Bob Stern »

A free, speedy alternative to PDF Pen for interleaving pages and performing a variety of PDF manipulations is the command line program Coherent PDF:

http://community.coherentpdf.com
ptram
Posts: 280
Joined: 2007-10-21 14:59:09

Re: text and translation on facing pages

Post by ptram »

I've not tried with extensive documents, but wouldn't a pair of parallel text frame chains do the same work as a DTP program? You can find the text frame commands under the Shape menu. At first sight, they look a lot like the text frames in any DTP program.

Paolo
Post Reply