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I would like to create parallel text in multiple languages. With some success, I have tried some existing packages to do that.

However, one thing I found very difficult is to align each paragraph but use different font sizes and (thus) independent line spacing for each language. This would be useful for languages where the texts are very different in length (for example Chinese and English).

Any ideas on how to do this?

homocomputeris
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Carl Johan
  • 551
  • 2
    Could you tell which packages you have already tried? Would something like a long table, where you type each paragraph into a cell, be useful to you? – Juan A. Navarro Aug 03 '10 at 09:50
  • I have used parallel and ledpar (should have included in original q). – Carl Johan Aug 03 '10 at 10:01
  • Just edit your question to say that. If you can show some sample code that you've tried, that would be even better. Certainly a good question, regardless. – Phil Miller Aug 03 '10 at 15:39
  • Is it ok to have page breaks only between paragraphs? In that case I'd try to define a macro that simply places two \parbox things side by side, with appropriate fonts, etc. – Jukka Suomela Aug 03 '10 at 17:41

3 Answers3

7

I've used parcolumns package for something similar.

frabjous
  • 41,473
  • I noticed that this was mentioned in another comment as well. This seems like a good choice and I will try it when I get a chance. – Carl Johan Aug 10 '10 at 12:10
1

Did you try multicolpar? I'm quite happy with it.

This arrangement is useful when displaying a translated document as a "parallel text". The number of columns to be used is controlled by a parameter of the multicolpar environment.

0

In 2023 the packages reledpar together with reledmac worked well. Here is a MWE:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{reledmac}
\usepackage{reledpar}

\begin{document}
\begin{pages}
        \begin{Leftside}
                \beginnumbering
                \pstart
                \lipsum[1]
                \pend
                \pstart
                \lipsum[2]
                \pend
                \endnumbering
        \end{Leftside}
        \begin{Rightside}
                \beginnumbering
                \pstart
                \lipsum[3]
                \pend
                \pstart
                \lipsum[4]
                \pend
                \endnumbering
        \end{Rightside}
\end{pages}
\Pages


\end{document}

If you need the parallel text to be on the same page in two columns, replace
\begin{pages}, \end{pages} and \Pages with
\begin{pairs}, \end{pairs} and \Columns,
respectively.

zs11
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