Benoit Maisonny wrote: > > Does anybody on this list have experience with dual language editing > with XXE? How do you layout both languages? > > We would like to let users edit a document containing the same text in 2 > languages and we've come up with a document structure looking like this: > > <Multi-lingual-block> > <p>A paragraph in English</p> > <p>Same paragraph in French</p> > </Multi-lingual-block> > > Of course, users would like to see each p in separate column: > > A paragraph Same paragraph > in English. in French. > > We've been playing with 3 different methods to do this with XXE and none > of them is really satisfying: > > 1. 2 views of the same doc
This seems to be the approach used by professional tools for translators. > One view (i.e. style sheet) showing only EN, one showing only FR, both > displayed simultaneously in XXE. We have a number of issues with this > solution: > - need for special rules to insert/delete/copy/paste in both sides at > the right place > - most importantly, XXE synchronises the views on the parent of the > currently selected element, not on the element itself. This means that > with a <div> containing several <p>, clicking inside the last <p> in one > view will scroll the other view to the <div>, not to the (invisible) > same <p>. After a bit of thinking, I think that the above approach is the most usable one. Simply do not use "display: none;" for the language you do not want to see, but rather use "color: #F0F0F0; font-size: x-small;" (#F0F0F0 is a very light gray). This will make the the language you do not want to see almost unnoticeable, but still present. And in such case, you'll have no dual view synchronization problems.
