Technology Inquiry: Easy Production of Side-By-Side English Translation with Greek or Latin?

We are regularly running into the need for easy production of html pages which allow the side-by-side display of English translation with the original Greek or Latin.

I think the target probably needs to be two or three column - probably two so that it will be usable on portrait size portable devices.

It also probably needs to be somehow divisible by "cells," in that the English translation is frequently longer than the Greek or Latin, and so to keep the passages of text together it's necessary to be able to have the end result look almost like a "spreadsheet" so that the English and original passages stay together. It's possible that links or tags could be used to jump from place to place, but ultimately side-by-side is probably the most usable.

Optimum would be the ability to easily change out the columns, so that for example the first column could be Latin, then the second switchable between Bailey, Munro, etc., with the switching function not causing you to lose your place in the text.

Since we're talking wish-list here, what we need is a system wherein the texts can be prepared and edited either locally or on the internet version, and then the result easily convertible to an html page for posting.

Currently one system I am using is Emacs org-mode, where I can prepare a text and then export the result to an html page like so. It's possible that emacs could do what we want but it has a steep learning curve.

I'd like to employ such as system to deploy side-by-side versions of Lucretius, rather than individually as we currently have it.

I made an early effort in the direction of multi-column pages here. This is somewhat usable, but it's not by any means optimum. The columns don't stay together and the system I used was not user friendly.

I know others would probably find suggestions useful, as Don (for one) is thinking about side-by side versions of his letter to Menoeceus.

I don't have any illusions that this will be easy to do, but if we start the thread now then maybe over time people will come across examples of other sites that are usable for such a project and we can explore how they are made.

WOW that is impressive!

Joshua and Don you'll be interested to take a look at this.

Thanks Tau Phi!

Ok I have a short section of Book One of Lucretius running as an example of what the software can do and its usability by someone who is not a programming expert (me).

This will require much more effort to implement the full book, but it is definitely doable, and being based in github, it can be set up to work on as a joint project:

Side By Side viewer

One particularly nice thing about the software is that you once you find a section in the text that you want to reference somewhere else, you can copy the URL and share it and that url will take you to the specific section - kind of like the artchive.org link to a pdf will take you to a particular page. I haven't previously had a good way to link to specific sections of a text version of Lucretius or other texts so using a system like this would be a good way to provide that.

Side By Side viewer