You can take a look at the gb4e package (or its predecessor covington). It was designed for glosses in linguistics, but the mechanism might suit your needs. It takes up to 3 lines of input, reads the first word (or group) of each line, puts those in a box, then reads the next word and puts those in a box... and so on. In this way, long lines will break at the same word/group for all 3 lines.
The way you could adapt it for your use is to enter the lines normally, but group each of them with curly brackets. That will prevent the package from separating it into individual words. For long lines, make two groups, starting the second group where you want the line break to occur. -Andy On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 22:18, Adam McCollum <[email protected]> wrote: > Dear list members, > > I have a formatting question. What I would like to do is give line by line > three versions of a certain text (in this case, different recensions of the > Gospel of Matthew in Ge'ez, i.e. classical Ethiopic). In a WYSIWYG program, > I can of course just eyeball where the line breaks need to be and make them > manually. The process is somewhat more complicated by the fact that I'd like > to have each verse somewhat separated from other verses, and this means that > when the verse extends more than one line, the breaks still have to coincide > for each version. I'm not sure if I've done a good job explaining what I'm > hoping to do, so I attach a PDF sample written in a WYSIWYG program. > > Many thanks in advance for any help! > > Best wishes, > > Adam > > Adam McCollum, Ph.D. > Lead Cataloger, Eastern Christian Manuscripts > Hill Museum & Manuscript Library > Saint John's University > P.O. Box 7300 > Collegeville, MN 56321 > > (320) 363-2075 (phone) > (320) 363-3222 (fax) > www.hmml.org > > > > -------------------------------------------------- > Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: > http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex > > -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
