Dual language flipped and rotated publication

[selhasone]

Dual language flipped and rotated publication

The finished publication would function like this: Read one language from one side (e.g. pages 1 - 10) and then flip the publication over, rotate it and read the publication in the second language. The last pages of both languages (pages 10 and 10) would meet in the middle - upside down to each other. This is a must for dual language brochures, company profiles, etc. if you don't want to include both languages on the same page. AFAIK, InDesign doesn't have this and requires an onerous InDesign to Acrobat-linked workflow. Huge fan of Photo and Designer and using Publisher beta now.

[Old Bruce]

I see this here with our two languages. As far as I know you would have to take all the English and make a PDF then place it page by page upside down in the French version. So not a solution that would work for more than a few pages. Also your example of 10 plus 10 is going to be off, here we tend to get 11 in French and 9 en anglais.

[dominik]

50 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

then place it page by page upside down in the French version.

There is 'View > Rotate' to rotate the page display in 45° angles. This could help while working on upside down placed text 

d.

[William Overington]

I have never seen such a publication. It is an interesting idea.

So, if Affinity Publisher were to have such a facility, how would it work?

Just musing.

The author of the document could produce a .afpub document with the pages in French followed by the pages in English, both right way up.

So the document, following Old Bruce's example, would be twenty pages, pages 1 to 11 in French and pages 12 to 20 in English.

One could then have a facility that is called "Flip and Rotate" and that would open a dialogue panel and have a text box in which one enters a whole number and a text box with the name of another file, a new file or one that can be overwritten. For this example, the number in the first text box would be 12. Then one clicks on a button labelled "Flip and Rotate" and the Affinity Publisher software 'under the bonnet' works away and produces the new file without altering the original file.

If one later wants to alter the original file one can do so and then go through the "Flip and Rotate" process again and overwrite the new file, maybe flipping from a later page number if the text in the two languages has been extended.

Hopefully making a PDF from the new file would just work fine, but Serif experts would need to check that out.

William

 

 

 

[Old Bruce]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

I have never seen such a publication.

You gotta get out more. [smiley face emoticon] I have seen documents which are one large page with six or more languages in individual columns, the columns would alternate top bottom orientation. 

[fde101]

I think this would be an imposition feature.  In theory it could be provided in the form of a checkbox to enable this when using the booklet or book printing layouts?

[William Overington]

2 hours ago, fde101 said:

I think this would be an imposition feature.  In theory it could be provided in the form of a checkbox to enable this when using the booklet or book printing layouts?

Well, a checkbox on its own would not be enough as one would need to specify at what page the text in the other language starts.

William

 

[William Overington]

21 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

You gotta get out more. [smiley face emoticon] I have seen documents which are one large page with six or more languages in individual columns, the columns would alternate top bottom orientation. 

Ah, conflation!

I wrote that I have never seen such a publication, meaning a publication of the type described in the original post.

I may have seen documents of the type that you describe, certainly documents which are printed on one large sheet of paper and then folded several times to produce a thick item with many languages on it which then goes into a box with an item as the documentation for that item, though I did not notice the orientation of the text in the individual parts of the document. But that is a different type of publication from the one in the original post.

William

 

[fde101]

17 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Well, a checkbox on its own would not be enough as one would need to specify at what page the text in the other language starts.

It would be half the pages, obviously...  unless it is handled using global layers (once available) in which case you are right, would need more than a checkbox.

[William Overington]

1 minute ago, fde101 said:

It would be half the pages, obviously...  unless it is handled using global layers (once available) in which case you are right, would need more than a checkbox.

Well, not obviously and maybe for a particular case not half the pages, because Old Bruce suggested that French text would need more pages than the equivalent English text.

William

 

[fde101]

12 minutes ago, William Overington said:

not obviously and maybe for a particular case not half the pages

The basic premise of the OP was that the document could be flipped over and the other side would be in the second language.  For this to work, one side of each page would be in language A, and the other side in language B.  You can't have some sheets of paper with only one side and others with two... you might only have *content* on one side or the other, but I've never seen a single-sided sheet of paper.

If the pages are not evenly split then the document will not match the intended format.

Granted that different languages may produce different numbers of pages of text - but in that case you would need to pad one or the other or find some way to make them even for this document format to work.

 

EDIT: sorry, I misread the original document format being requested.  The original poster was requesting two-sided pages in each language, one of them reversed and printed after the first.  That is not the same format I was thinking of.  The actual format asked for could indeed have a different number of pages for each language, and if not reversed, more than two languages as well.

[v_kyr]

On 5/27/2019 at 2:00 PM, selhasone said:

AFAIK, InDesign doesn't have this and requires an onerous InDesign to Acrobat-linked workflow...

I don't use or know ID well enough, but this way here doesn't sound to be Acrobat related at all ...

• Indesign CC - layout a dual language book, 2nd language reverse order and upside down

... though can be done too in PDF.

[selhasone]

14 hours ago, v_kyr said:

I don't use or know ID well enough, but this way here doesn't sound to be Acrobat related at all ...

• Indesign CC - layout a dual language book, 2nd language reverse order and upside down

... though can be done too in PDF.

Thanks for the link. Yes, that's what I thought originally. But I thought Serif could design a more streamlined solution. And, I absolutely want to avoid using the PDF option, which would require purchasing Acrobat (trying to shift away from Adobe, after all!)

[selhasone]

14 hours ago, fde101 said:

The basic premise of the OP was that the document could be flipped over and the other side would be in the second language.  For this to work, one side of each page would be in language A, and the other side in language B.  You can't have some sheets of paper with only one side and others with two... you might only have *content* on one side or the other, but I've never seen a single-sided sheet of paper.

If the pages are not evenly split then the document will not match the intended format.

Granted that different languages may produce different numbers of pages of text - but in that case you would need to pad one or the other or find some way to make them even for this document format to work.

 

EDIT: sorry, I misread the original document format being requested.  The original poster was requesting two-sided pages in each language, one of them reversed and printed after the first.  That is not the same format I was thinking of.  The actual format asked for could indeed have a different number of pages for each language, and if not reversed, more than two languages as well.

I was asking for a solution where the reader can read a publication that has content in one language from page 1 onwards, and then they flip the publication over, rotate the publication, and read it in another language starting with its page 1. In my particular scenario, I don't want to see facing pages, each with its own language, although that has been done already.

In the Adobe forum, jbully0 on Sep 12, 2017 wrote: " I'm trying to layout a dual language book where you flip the book over so that each language looks like it has a front cover and flows from left to right." I think jbully0 did a better job explaining my wish than I did, ha ha.

[A_B_C]

But what if you created two documents, one for each language, and used the method indicated by @dominik above, rotating the entire workspace by 180 degrees to make the top-down version? Then export both documents to PDF and use any basic PDF editor to stitch the two versions together. Wouldn’t that work?

(You might have to manually create printers marks, depending on your requirements.)

[selhasone]

1 minute ago, A_B_C said:

But what if you created two documents, one for each language, and used the method indicated by @dominik above, rotating the entire workspace by 180 degrees to make the top-down version? Then export to PDF and use any basic PDF editor to stitch the two versions together. Wouldn’t that work?

Yes, that would work, along with other solutions that incorporate a pdf workflow. However, I would like to keep the entire process within the Affinity family. That way, if I need to make any changes, I can just pull up the original Publisher document, make my alterations, and render it to print or screen.

[A_B_C]

Well, then I fear you won’t have another option but calculate the number of your pages very precisely and use the canvas rotate method applied to a single document. 

[A_B_C]

You could assign a custom shortcut to View > Rotate > Rotate Left and to View > Rotate > Reset Rotation such that you can easily get from one half of your document to the other. 

[selhasone]

1 minute ago, A_B_C said:

Well, then I fear you won’t have another option but calculate the number of your pages very precisely and use the canvas rotate method applied to a single document. 

I think the wizards at Serif would be able to come up with a solution that would make this process easy. I am thinking of thoughtful usability and elegant execution with a number of options for the designer. I am sure they can do this.

[selhasone]

1 minute ago, A_B_C said:

You could assign a custom shortcut to View > Rotate > Rotate Left and to View > Rotate > Reset Rotation such that you can easily get from one half of your document to the other. 

I am going to try your ideas this weekend. Much appreciated!

Right now, since Publisher is in beta, I am using Indesign CC to do this work. I love InDesign (and PageMaker before that) but Adobe ... that's a different issue altogether, ha ha.

[William Overington]

Well surely the idea is to be able to produce the source document as, say, some English text starting with a front cover followed by, say, some French text starting with a front cover and then use a facility yet to be added to Affinity Publisher so that one can specify a page number of where the French text starts and then Affinity Publisher's "under the bonnet" software will automatically generate a new file set out with the English text as it is and the French text upside down and reordered so that a hardcopy printed book of the resultant file is as if it is two books in one.

There may be various workarounds to get there by laborious means but surely the best solution would be to have such an automated facility built in to Affinity Publisher.

William

 

[selhasone]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

Well surely the idea is to be able to produce the source document as, say, some English text starting with a front cover followed by, say, some French text starting with a front cover and then use a facility yet to be added to Affinity Publisher so that one can specify a page number of where the French text starts and then Affinity Publisher's "under the bonnet" software will automatically generate a new file set out with the English text as it is and the French text upside down and reordered so that a hardcopy printed book of the resultant file is as if it is two books in one.

There may be various workarounds to get there by laborious means but surely the best solution would be to have such an automated facility built in to Affinity Publisher.

William

 

Exactly. I am looking for a native, seamless solution from Serif. Hope they can deliver this. I have to create lots of documents featuring two languages and this would be a killer feature for me. Btw, where do I go to request this feature? Being a bit lazy and didn't look for it myself! Thanks.

[selhasone]

On 5/28/2019 at 12:05 AM, William Overington said:

So, if Affinity Publisher were to have such a facility, how would it work?

William

My idea is that you would lay out the dual-language publication as you normally would any other publication (assuming in my example, English and French and not, for example, Arabic**) -- cover page, facing pages, back cover. Let's assume a 20-page document. All content (both languages) is the same side up and the pages are numbered sequentially. Then you click on the Dual Language macro/feature and you get a dialog box. You would then choose various options -- indicate which pages you want rotated 180 degrees, including the back cover, etc. All items remain editable - texts, images, links, etc. Publisher would automatically renumber the pages for you (after you choose the sequence or breakpoint) and start backwards from the back cover so the page numbering would be like this: Front cover, 1, 2, 3, .... 9, 10 -- 10, 9 ... 3, 2, 1, Back cover (which is of course the Front cover of the other language!). Or, everything happens when you click to create a new document and you tell Publisher your layout options.

Plus, other options could be available for back-to-back dual language layouts -- 1-sheet document, adjacent column rotation, etc.

**For Arabic and other right-to-left languages like Arabic, you wouldn't need the rotation feature because the publication would stay the same side up. You would read English from the left (the back cover from the Arabic perspective) and read Arabic from the right (the "back cover" from the English perspective). You would still need the auto-renumbering feature.

I believe it can be done, certainly even more efficiently than what I have described. When you stop to think about this, it's really not that difficult a concept. We already have, in various forms, rotation, numbering and live editing features. What do you people think? Just to be clear, at the risk of repeating myself as I already mentioned this in other posts, I want to stay inside Publisher to do this and not have to roundtrip to another application.

 

[William Overington]

@selhasone

Well, it seems to me that it is a matter of policy as to whether it gets done.

I suppose that it depends whether this idea is seen as some fringe minor possibility that might perhaps be done sometime way in the future or is seen as some reach for the stars, wow look what an end user can do with Affinity Publisher idea to be done now as something to demonstrate at a launch event to show just what Affinity Publisher can do as part of what makes it a way out in front software application.

William

 

[A_B_C]

I would probably want this to appear inside Publisher as some sort of Imposition Persona. Not sure whether that will happen though.