Re: [Not so?] Big problem

[Brian Barker <b....@btinternet.com.INVALID>]

At 16:04 26/07/2019 +0200, Giorgio Tagliabue wrote:
>I'm writing a book about an opera of Richard Wagner, Der Ring des 
>Nibelungen. I need to have, on the same page, a text on one column, 
>a text on two columns (for ex. the poem in German, sided by his 
>translation in Italian) and on the same sheet, notes at the end of 
>the page, on one column. Unfortunately, it's impossible for me to 
>write a Note belonging to a part of the poem (that is on 2 columns) 
>at the end of the page on 1 column, as in the included example. If I 
>call for 2 columns, also the notes are constricted on 2 columns. How can I do?

First, a minor point. If you choose to align your two-column material 
using tabs, don't use multiple tab characters as you have done to 
space across the default tab positions. This is a very fragile 
technique, as you will see if you need to make modifications to the 
text in the left column: the right column will move out of alignment. 
In addition, if you change the font, text in the right column will 
also move out of alignment. Note that if you send such a document to 
a correspondent, it may be rendered on their system with a different 
font with the same or similar name, or even a different font, so they 
may see your carefully constructed columns looking very ragged. 
Instead, set your own tab stop and use a single tab character between 
the parts of the text.

The description you give implies that you are choosing columns as 
part of your page style, in which case footnotes will indeed be 
separated by column - which is not what you want. But columns are 
also a facility in Sections. Use Insert | Section... to insert a 
two-column section, with the text for the respective languages in the 
separate columns. You will need to use Insert | Manual Break... to 
create a column break between the different text blocks.

But a much better way of handling such material is to use tables. Use 
Table | Insert > | Table... to create a table with two columns and 
one row; you probably won't want any border. (Note that the residual 
pale grey lines you see are editing guides and do not appear on 
printed output or in Page Preview.)  Place the different language 
text in separate table cells.

You could use this technique in different ways:

o You might want to insert a separate table for each instance of your 
parallel translations, with the intervening text being handled 
normally. See Example A.odt.

o Alternatively you might use a two-column table for all the relevant 
part of your document. The parallel translations would have their own 
rows of the table, as would the normal text between. You would need 
to merge the table cells in the relevant rows to enable the 
intervening text to span the page width normally, as you wish. See 
Example B.odt.

>I beg your pardon for my poor English.

No problem! Your English is infinitely better that my Italian!

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker