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I'm working on a Latin commentary, and I'm currently just using footnotes for both vocabulary and commentary. I'd love to divide the page as in the below image—in three sections, text on top, vocabulary in the middle, commentary on the bottom. Is there a way I can achieve this using LaTex and, if so, what is it?

Thanks for the help.

enter image description here

Joel Derfner
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    Please provide a minimal example people can work with. I suggest starting by searching for 'critical editions' on CTAN. For example, https://www.ctan.org/pkg/reledmac. (There is a whole series of *ed* packages, many descendants of ancestors.) You can also search specifically for footnotes e.g. bigfoot. This isn't software I use, so I don't know if anything offers precisely the layout you want. Likely you will have to adapt something, but the clusters of packages for this provide a great many tools, especially far broader support for footnotes than LaTeX. – cfr Sep 28 '23 at 03:59
  • Interesting. Can you please add some code, e.g. for 1 or 2 pages, how you do it at the moment? With fixed text as a given, it may be possible to do manually. But how do you deal with changing text? E.g. then the compiler has to decide, which extract from a vocabulary to list, and which line to link to which footnote. Thank you. – MS-SPO Oct 29 '23 at 12:40

2 Answers2

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I ended up using reledmac and it's given me everything I need! The documentation is a little difficult for a LaTeX beginner like me, but I was able to make my way through enough of it that with trial and error I got what I was looking for!

Joel Derfner
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If you use the multicol package, you can make two columns and end them at will.

Then you sandwich the information between these:

\begin{multicols}{2}

\end{multicols}{2}

Here's a good Overleaf template that can help you get started.

angelayd
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    Welcome. Contributions are welcome and multicols might be useful, but a big part of the issue here is the sophisticated layout of the material in the footnotes. Moreover, your code will typeset a spurious 2 (or would if it was complete enough to typeset). – cfr Sep 28 '23 at 04:01