Can I publish an English/French bilingual in iBooks Author?

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Can I publish an English/French bilingual in iBooks Author?

Can I create a bilingual text book with English (in column one) and French (in column two) (landscape mode) ? I see that some languages are not allowable. French might be OK. I can adjust the layout so that the pages flow, if the font is needed to be changed in size, by using a standard size font and plenty of space left at the foot of each page. I can imagine the problems there could be with font size which of course must be adjustable for the poorly sighted. Is the project feasable or must I be forced to publish separate language versions of the book. If this question is only answerable by a Mac iBook publishing specialist how do I contact such an individual? I have a French translation already prepared and I'm ready to go. Ian Boyce

iMac, Mac OS X (10.0.x)

Posted on Mar 16, 2014 4:30 PM

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Answer 1

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Tom Gewecke

Level 10

116,078 points

Mar 16, 2014 7:21 PM in response to Ian Boyce

The two languages you plan to use certainly do not pose any obstacle to your project.

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Answer 2

Ian Boyce Author

Level 1

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Mar 16, 2014 7:51 PM in response to Ian Boyce

Thank you Tom. I am grateful indeed for being able to use both languages, but will the book work with the two languages combined as I have described? Previous experience has taught me that the rules and strictures about book construction are very demanding. There are many rules. eg paras and insets made in a particular way etc etc.

I want the pages to open every time regardless of font size with each individual page in Eng with its French translation on the side of the same page. If I leave plenty of space on each page then I hope to be able to restrict the flow of one page onto the next. This introduces the question of having to put in "returns" from the end of my text to the next page. Wont these returns travel also to the next page as I think they would in a Word doc.? In its simplest form the question is, "How do I go about making a bilingual book so that it has pages that don't flow onto the next page and allow for font to be changed in size?

I'm happy to give it a go and just hope that it works out but my earlier books did not share this particular problem. Hope you can help. Ian

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Answer 3

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

116,078 points

Mar 16, 2014 8:04 PM in response to Ian Boyce

I don't know whether the layout you are planning is possible is either .ibooks or .epub format. Have you already tried a google search? Here is one item I found

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10002895/two-column-parallel-text-epub-is-it- possible

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Answer 4

ajwells

Level 1

40 points

Mar 17, 2014 6:03 PM in response to Ian Boyce

If you want to avoid your layout reflowing and thus throwing of the correspondence between the English Column of text and the French Column of text, you could starting from a portrait only template. Or you could use a landscape template and disable portrait mode by going to the Document tab of the inspector and selecting "disable portrait orientation".

I'm pretty sure that should keep your text from reflowing and make it WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get). Then you can manually put in column breaks in appropriate spots to acheive what you want. EXAMPLE: Add a column of english text; insert column break. Add corresponding french text; insert column break (or page break).

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