[comp.text] Parallel Two-column printing

foessmei@lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de (Reinhard Foessmeier) (02/06/90)

-- Resumo:  Kiel presi paralelajn paragrafojn per TeX?

In his TeXbook, appendix D, p. 387, D.E. Knuth gives an example
of parallel printing of bilingual texts in two columns.  The example
chiefly deals with calculating the widths of the boxes, and it doesn't
seem to take care of the problem of page breaking.

What I should like is an instruction that would take two
paragraphs to be printed one beside the other, and break them if
they do not quite fit on the remaining part of the page.
While this was remarkably easy to do in troff, I haven't found
an adequate solution for TeX.  If you put the paragraphs each into
a \vbox and juxtapose them into an \hbox, the \vsplit instruction can't
take the lines apart any longer.  If you change the \output routine,
you could just print the left half and save the right hand side
in some box -- but how do you print it when the left hand side is
already full?  I guess it could be done but this seems to complicated
a solution to such an elementary problem.

If somebody has a solution, I'd be very interested.
If it could co-operate with LaTeX, it would even be better.
_________
Reinhard F\"ossmeier, Technische Univ. M\"unchen | "Sendmail can safely be made
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