My church is publishing for the 1st time a bilingual bible french / English. I’m actually passionate about this project, and love the challenge of finding ways to get InDesign work well for us.
So far I’ve been using InDesign only for a unilingual bible, but now I need to split each page into 2 columns, each column for 1 language. The Bible is divided into books, chapters, and verses. I compared about 15 bilingual bibles to see what coud be possible and finally set my mind on wanting each verses of a chapter to be aligned in both languages.
With my current knowledge of InDesign, that means I’d have to create a Master page with 2 non-threaded text frames on each page, and I guess I’d need to activate the grid to have the text be aligned on both columns. Then I’d go to each page and manually cut and paste the text so that we have the same number of verses in french and English on each page.
With about 1,500 pages, that’s a lot of work to do if done manually, and I need this document to be ready asap this year so we can print. So here are my questions:
1) would you be able to put me in contact with a designer who has already successfully done this work or similar ?
2) would you know of a script which could automatically split the text on each page to fit in one page and have the same number of verses in both columns ? (maybe I’m dreaming, but I guess there is no harm asking)
3) would you have any other ideas than what I mentioned about how I could go about designing this bilingual bible ?
Thank you, any feedback and help is much appreciated.
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