Re: Independent columns through the whole document

[slomium]

Oliver,

In reply to this:

>> I want to have the following: a document that contains
>> two *independent* columns, where each of those columns
>> is going through the whole (multi-paged) document.
>
>> There reason for this is:
>> I want to have one text as the original, layoutet in the first column.
>> The second column is to be intended as a "comment-column" (or one
>> also could use it as a
>> column with the translation of the "original column".
>
>> How to achieve that?  This should be easy in lout?!?

And Jeff's comments:

> There is nothing in the current Lout packages which supports two
> independent columns of text through the document.  You could
> become an expert and modify the basic package so that the
> @Text galley becomes two galleys, @TextA and @TextB, targeted
> at separate columns of the page.

I wonder if this definition would do what you want:

import @BasicSetup
def @twocol left x right y
{
3i @Wide{x} ||0.2i 3i @Wide{y}
}

In your document, you'd use it like this:

@LP

address@hidden For Virginia Woolf, @I Middlemarch was the magnificent book which
for all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for
grown-up people.}

@twocol

address@hidden A brief comment.}

See attached for an example.

Note that the ||0.2i is a horizontal concatenation symbol that's
described in the expert's manual.  The definition I wrote is basically
the idea from p. 8 of my Lout 3.39 Expert's Manual which has {2.8i
@Wide @TextPlace} ||0.4i {2.8i @Wide @TextPlace} as an example for 2
column pages.

I'm sure there are some tweaks that could be made, e.g. getting the
two columns to fill the available space, but i think this is headed in
the right direction for you.  So, unless i misunderstood, perhaps it
is easy in Lout?

Thanks,
David

2col.txt
Description: Text document