Two parallel text flows in one document possible?

users
#1

Hello everyone.

I would like to write a book in German and English in parallel and let the German text flow on the left and the English text on the right, or two columns of German on the left and English on the right. Is that technically possible in LO Writer? I haven't found anything about it yet.

Best, Ulf

#2

Hi,
I sometimes have to translate documents. So that I can see the
relationship of the texts I put one language on the right and the other
left on the page. For that I use a two-column table which works quite
well. Not sure if that is the most elegant solution for what you want.
Of course you can format each column as you want (e.g. with no table
borders), and the spell-check language can be set separately on each
column.

Greetings
Harvey

#3

A two-column TABLE seems to be a very smart solution for this. Thank you, Harvey.

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#4

Sorry, but I was hoping you would ask HOW the spell-check language is set separately on each column.
[I hate it when someone says "Of course" on an issue I don't see.] :wink:
Since you grasped it immediately, I'm afraid I must ask one of you: How do you do that?

#5

I'll just throw in that I've tested this but found it didn't find to work
well enough to use, but that's about footnotes.. both placement and
numbering.)

However, I tested this method, I found that defining three columns provided
the control I needed for the gutter (area between the columns) better than
trying to manage the gutter within the LO interface. That is, I used column
2 for entering the gutter dimensions and tole LO to have no space between
columns, and the table display seemed to be less inconsistent.

I also found that during testing, it was much easier to keep the text in LO
Calc in 3 columns, and make edits there, then paste the entire document
into LO Writer as a table for formatting. This would make defining the
language very easy: Select the entire column and in tools --> language
choose the language for the column.

#6

This requires knowing how to use styles. For the column in German, all of the styles you use (paragraph, heading, or character styles need to be modified to list German as the language. For the column in English, all of the styles you use (paragraph, heading, or character styles need to be modified to list English as the language.This results in two sets of styles, one for German and one for English. For detailed instructions on doing this, you need to download the latest Writer Guide or download the the chapter on styles and the chapters on styles from the Getting Started Guide. Or, you could just download the entire Writer Guide so you would have a good reference for other questions about Writer.

Dan

#7

Thanks, Dan. It's funny: I thought I knew styles, which are indispensable to any kind of serious writing, but never noticed that Language setting in the Character style Font tab.
Every day is a school day.
-John

#8

the language setting is also in the Font tab for all paragraph styles. Did you notice this?

Dan

#9

I just klick on the top of the one column to select the content of the
whole column. Then go to Tools > Language > For Selection and select
the language to be checked for that column.

#10

Hi Dan,

Yes I did, but the Font tab is a Character tab in a Paragraph style. (If you do Format > Paragraph from the menu, the dialog has no Font tab, because that is under Format > Character. One of the idiosyncrasies about OO/LO Paragraph /styles/ [related to MS Word history?] is that they incorporate Character style functions.) So I tend to think of those as attributes of a Character style -- but as you say, in this case they are (also) in a Paragraph style.

Thanks again for checking my understanding,
John

#11

Hi Harvey,

Good point! That is an another good reason for doing the columns of the page(s) as table columns: It simplifies selecting a column as a syntactic field. I never thought about that, and appreciate you generalizing the solution in that way, which is an interesting variation on style management.

Thanks,
John