Discript - from front and back not side by side

Question

This is an amazing tool! Am I able to create a discript (Roman script and Arabic Script) but with the two texts separate from each other I.e. with the roman script version starting at the front and the Arabic script starting at the back, not side by side? Thanks so much for any help you can give!

Answer 1

Maybe I’m not understanding what you want to do, but wouldn’t you just want to create one PDF of the Roman (front to back) and another PDF of the Arabic (back to front) and stick them together? There are various tools that let you manipulate PDF files into a single file.

Comments

I too wonder exactly what this person is needing. But if in fact they wish to make a “roman” book reading from “front to back” (left to right) and then the user can flip the book over and read from “back to front” (right to left) – that is interesting.
Phil you say there are various tools to put 2 PDFs together. Can you recommend one? i.e. a reliable/safe, offline, free tool for field users? This would be helpful for more than just this user’s request, but for many publications (like combining a complex front matter PDF onto a complex dictionary/lexicon PDF to get a whole publishable book), or to add password protection, etc. Most tools I’ve seen now require uploading the PDFs to the cloud where they are stored on some server somewhere and then combined or altered and then sent back to us. This is unacceptable for many applications of a sensitive nature. Thanks.

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David,
I use Adobe Acrobat so I don’t have lots of experience with other tools. They keep changing and many are online, but here is one that is free/open source and runs on your computer: Features in PDFsam Basic, free and open source - PDFsam

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Thank you! I’ll check it out.

Answer 2

The whole reason for wanting a diglot or discript is to be able to compare and contrast the two versions side-by-side. If you want two scripts in the same book, but you don’t want them side-by-side, then I would strongly recommend not interleaving the pages between the two scripts. That would just serve to confuse the readers. Just create two separate books, one RS and one AS, and if you want to publish them in the same volume, then just combine the RS PDF with the AS PDF (with an appropriate number of blank pages between them to make the number of pages divisible by 4), and you should be able to print that PDF as a book.The RS reader opens the book to the left, and the AS reader opens the book to the right, and they only see their script as they are reading along. I personally feel, however, that it would be better in that case just to publish the texts as two separate books.

Answer 3

I agree with @jeff_heath that you probably want 2 different books. But if you really still want to join two PDFs together, I’d recommend using pdftk as it is free and has a ton of different options, as can be seen from this page of examples:

I don’t think this would be needed for an “LTR-meet-in-the-middle-RTL” book, but for a publication where you want to be able to read two different languages from each cover into the middle (recalling Thai-English inflight magazines!), you could flip the second one 180 degrees [and maybe have to reverse the pages too!] and then join them together into the final PDF.

Rotate an entire PDF document to 180 degrees

pdftk in.pdf cat 1-endsouth output out.pdf