Text flowing through frames

Question

I'm typesetting a book with two flows of text.

Text 1 is regular text. Text 2 I would like it to flow through defined frames at the bottom of the page, all of the same width but of variable height.

I know how to do this with the FLOWFRAM package using static frames. I could also do it in other ways. But I do not want to manually break my text. I would like the text to flow through the frames (dynamic frames) at the bottom of the page, while another text flow on the top.

This is easy to obtain with indesign obviously. Is there a way to do it in Latex? Please see my MWE. I can make a text flow in the bottom frames, but how can I make another text flow in the top part of the page?

\documentclass[a5paper]{book}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{flowfram}
\newflowframe [1-2]
    {\textwidth}
    {7cm}
    {0\textwidth}
    {0\textheight}
    [Frame1]
 \newflowframe [3-5]
{\textwidth}
{3cm}
{0\textwidth}
{0\textheight}
[Frame2]


 \newflowframe [6-7]
{\textwidth}
{5cm}
{0\textwidth}
{0\textheight}
[Frame3]



\begin{document}
\lipsum{1}
\end{document}

Answer 1

One solution could be have each text in a separate pdf where earch frame should be a whole page, and use the pages of that files as images mixed in the final document in any order. In the MWE, these images are framed with \fbox to show the exact dimensions of each page.

If this imagesmust be included in a regular order (A1 and B1 in page 1, A2 and B2 in page 2, etc.) with a loop you can mix even large texts with a few lines of code. The MWE show that with a reddish \lipsum[1-10] (fake dummy Latin) from a pdf of 5 pages (a6paper in landscape) is printed at five top frames and another similar pdf with a blue \kant[1-7] (non sense English text in Kantian style) is printed as bottom frames.

Depending of your exact goal, you may want also crop every each source pdf page with pdfcrop to avoid original margins and vertical top or bottom gaps. Then each page will have random heights and even different widths (The MWE show that 9th frame is clearly smaller , because all pages have been cropped). Note that using cropped images with size relatives to the text layout could produce unexpected inconsistencies of font sizes (not in this MWE, however).

MWE:

lipsum.tex source (Use it to make also kant.tex after modify the dummy text and color accordingly):

\documentclass[a6paper,landscape]{article}
\usepackage{lipsum,kantlipsum,xcolor}
\usepackage[margin=1cm]{geometry}
\pagestyle{empty}
\begin{document}
\color{red!30!black} 
\section{Lipsum}
\lipsum[1-10] %\kant[1-7]
\end{document}

lipsum-crop.pdf and kant-crop.pdf:

pdfcrop lipsum.pdf
pdfcrop kant.pdf

main document:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage[margin=2cm]{geometry}
\usepackage{ifthen}
\begin{document}
\whiledo{\value{page}<6}{%
\fbox{\includegraphics[page=\thepage,
height=.45\textheight,width=\linewidth,keepaspectratio]{lipsum-crop.pdf}}\par
\vspace{\fill}  
\fbox{\includegraphics[page=\thepage,
height=.45\textheight,width=\linewidth,keepaspectratio]{kant-crop.pdf}}
\newpage}%
\end{document}