Re: [NTG-context] English-Vietnamese facing pages

On 3 Apr 2023, at 11:54, jbf via ntg-context wrote:

Am always up for a challenge, but hope this one is not beyond my possibilities! Have a request to produce a book with English-Vietnamese facing pages. The text doesn't have to be strictly in sync, but generally so. The only ConTeXt guidelines I think I have at the moment are (1) an old module called m-streams (which I am assuming is now obsolete), and (2) an exchange of emails on this list over a decade about bilingual typesetting.

It won't bother me too much if I have to tell the intending author and his editor that this might be beyond me, but before taking that stance, I have a couple of simple questions that someone might be able to respond to. And, BTW, the Vietnamese font is not the problem. Tex Gyre Pagella seems to be able to cope with that at least!

Q 1: Has anybody reading this actually produced a bilingual book (it doesn't have to be en-vn) with ConTeXt? And if so would you be prepared to offer me some basic guideline

Way, way back when, I did a document in NL + EN by creating two separate pdfs for the page bodies only and using a third context doc to included those pages alternated, with the correct headers added in that third document. Not a ’nice’ solution at all, but it worked for me. (this was in the nineties, though)

Q 2: There is some guidance from Wolfgang on https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Columns towards the end of that page. I tried two or three pages of the first chapter of the book, placing English in outputstream[one] and the Vietnamese in outputstream[two] and kind of got a suitable result except that the last paragraph of both languages ended up BEFORE the chapter began. No idea why. The rest seemed okay. So my question is whether or not Wolfgang's sample (where he says 'a simple example but I had to write the splitter myself') would be sufficient for me to put the book together?

Q 2: I suppose the third question is whether, since LMTX, there has been any further development in the 'streams' mechanism that might help me?

Julian

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