Reply To: tips & scripts for bilingual bible

Tables might work if you can live with their limitations. Simplest would be a 2-column table for each chapter, with each verse getting a cell; I might add a third column to hold verse nos., and “hang” it in the margin. Tables let you align the text within cells as you choose — top, center, bottom — and then the table takes care of aligning the rows; you might want to set the table to prevent cells from breaking between pages. In my work, the chief problem with ID’s tables is that they are incompatible with footnotes, so if you could not treat them as end-notes (where stock ID offers no help anyway) then they would have to be faked.

Running parallel bi-lingual text columns on each page, or perhaps on facing pages, would allow full use of ID’s features, and perhaps a clever scripter could figure a way to automate aligning verses. However, I assume that the length of verses is pretty close in both the English and French translations, usually within a line or two. So I might try defining three different paragraph styles for verse, identical except that the second would add a blank line for space after, and the third adding two. Still handwork, but speeded up. Starting a new chapter in the middle of the page might be more difficult than with tables handling verse formatting, but you could still add verse nos. in the margin via an anchored text box that would move with the verse.

Good luck!

David