Diglot on Facing Pages (Single Column per page)

Question

Is it possible to create a Diglot/Discript on Facing Pages, using a Single Column?

This has been requested by for Song Books, because A5 double columns cause too much wrapping.

I have not been able to get it to work (v2.0.30 and v2.1.8)

Thanks, Mike

Answer 1

Including the plugin via the UI helps skip the manual running of the priject but it being included does nothing in itself (except take up some of TeX’s memory and make additional configuation available). It is still necessary to speciy which columns go on which pages (\polyglotpages{L,R} for example), and how big the columns should be, (step 2 as given above). These settings should go in ptxprint-premods.tex available from the advanced menu.

If by ‘second diglot config’ you mean the styling etc. pages for the ‘secondary text’, there is no special configuration necessary unless you wish to use wider margins, alter font sizes, etc.

To get multi-column diglots as per Mark"s image, you must have a copy of perl available so that you can run the (command line) merge program, and basically abandon the graphical user interface.

Answer 2

I was distracted back in March and didn’t reply to Mark’s question about how useful a two-page spread might be. Here’s one thing we would like to do in small groups:

Create a diglot of a text and track discourse elements in English and vernacular, side-by-side, to help translators and other speakers see differences and places where the translation might follow English too closely. One column on facing portrait pages would give a bigger overall view.

The Translator Training workshops in PNG use 4-version (landscape on A4) handouts to guide the group through drafting steps, so even with all-Latin script I can see uses for more than two Scripture versions printed in parallel.

Answer 3

Summary of 1 column per page diglot:

Just so that it is clearer, and you don’t have to piece together pieces and revisions from above, the method to produce a facing-page diglot is now as follows:

1. Follow normal procedure to produce a diglot (but don’t trying to optimise the column width)
2. On the advanced tab, add polyglot-simplepages to the (comma-separated) list of plugins.
3. In ptxprint-mods.tex, add these lines:

\polyglotpages{L,R}
\def\DiglotRFraction{1.0}
\def\DiglotLFraction{1.0}

That should be all that’s needed.

Other news
Python code for command-line N-glot merging has taken some steps closer to completion than it has been until recently, but it’s still at least a week or 2 away. It will then need to be integrated into the user interface code, with a method to define the ‘secondary configurations’ and various merge-controlling parameters.

Comments

Oh, excellent, thank you! It works great for our discript. I’m getting unrelated errors for a diglot with a different project but maybe I’ll just email support. Thanks for all your fast help

Answer 4

You can save much of the pain that DavidG referenced by simply adding:

polyglot-simplepages

to the Plugins text entry on the advanced page. Then use the ptxprint-premods.tex snippet. Since you know the plugin will be loaded, the snippet doesn’t need to be conditional. So simply add:

\polyglotpages{L,R}
\def\DiglotRFraction{1.0}
\def\DiglotLFraction{1.0}

to ptxprint-premods.tex, as per above (included here for complete summary of actions).

Answer 5

PDF creation is looking cleaner for me, but I am having problems with the footnotes/xrefs being placed correctly. They seem to be placed off page (far lower right)

Comments

I was able to fix this by disabling this option:

Answer 6

I am typesetting two hymnals from the same PT project but in different extra books.
When I add the 4 polyglot options specified above, it only prints out the first project.
Does the polyglot option need to be added to the secondary diglot config?
Does the polyglot option support diglots coming from the same PT project?

Answer 7

@MikeB, I not sure I understand your “but in different extra books”. Are you saying that you need to merge XXA from one project with XXB from another? I don’t think there’s any way that the user interface will let you do that, (but you can do it from the command line).

The options above are to make a ‘normal diglot’ (2 columns per page) switch to facing pages. They don’t alter the merging / synchronisation of the input USFM files at all.

If you mean that config A and config B are from the same source text but get different orthography conversions, then that shouldn’t be a problem.

Answer 8

I am trying to do a diglot using XXA and XXB from the same Paratext project. They do use different PtxPrint configurations CONFIGA and CONFIGB, so I had no problem selecting it in the UI, but it isn’t working. The only text in the PDF output is the text for XXA using CONFIGA.

Comments

I would suggest you create a copy of the project and place xxb of the second project in xxa. Then you should be able to make the second project the diglot of the first project with both using xxa.

Answer 9

I agree that a Diglot really should be pulling things from TWO (or more) projects. Expecting it to pull different books from the same project and merge them as a diglot isn’t what we designed it to do. However, if you manage to convince it to do what you want, let us know! I’m curious