Help! Formatting a bilingual document...........

[catalyst]

I have to format a bilingual document (the side by side) format, and its not going very well.

Is there an aide-memoire or a link (I tried googleing it) or something that would point to how it should be laid out?

 

[dapaterson]

In Word, set up a table of two column and many, many rows.

Each para / text grouping goes side by side, English and French.

Then make the boxes for the table clear, and you've got the properly aligned text.

Auto para numbering, however, will make your brain hurt in this scenario.

 

[catalyst]

Cool beans thanks -

If the French text is longer, would it go on the left side?

 

[Neill McKay]

Cool beans thanks -

If the French text is longer, would it go on the left side?

In bilingual docs I've seen it's usually on the right.

Something I've started seeing very recently is for the French column to be slightly wider than the English column.  That just about corrects the issue with longer French text producing excess white space between the English paragraphs.