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Two column reader on Mac?

 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies Post Reply
Bjorn
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 Message 1 of 4
05 March 2012 at 12:13pm | IP Logged 
Are there any special software for Mac that has two column to be used for LR.
L1 in left column and L2 for right column?
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mrwarper
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 Message 2 of 4
13 March 2012 at 7:14pm | IP Logged 
I don't know how freaky modern Macs are but this should work in just about any platform without any special software, provided your two texts are typeset similarly enough:

Open two instances of your favourite text viewer/word processor, etc. and tile their windows horizontally (so you have two columns). Load one of the texts in each of them and you should need just three key strokes to turn page on both columns as you read on: page down (in window A), window switch, page down (in window B).

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kam1892
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 Message 3 of 4
24 March 2012 at 11:05pm | IP Logged 
You might try a little program called Tofu, at http://amarsagoo.info/tofu/. It's for OS X 10.4 and above. It will arrange text in columns, but does so automatically and the columns adjust to the height of the window.

The help file says: "There are several ways you can choose the text to view in Tofu. It can either be contained in a document, for example an RTF or plain text document, or can come from another application, such as your Internet browser."

Perhaps you could use this if you had a text file with L1, followed by the L2 translation. Then adjust the window size to display the columns so the languages would be next to each other.

Actually I just tried it with a random text document, and there is no vertical scrollbar, only the horizontal one, so your L1/L2 sample probably couldn't be very long in order to keep in just 2 columns. Maybe experiment with it and see what you can do. If you can determine the maximum amount of text per column, and set up your L1 & L2 to alternate every few paragraphs, it could work.

Edited by kam1892 on 24 March 2012 at 11:12pm

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yuriFromRoma
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 Message 4 of 4
25 March 2012 at 3:10pm | IP Logged 
@Bjorn: you can always use OpenOffice Word (which is available for free on both Mac and Linux as well as on Windows) for such task: create a new document, click on insert->table and choose 2x1 size (which means "2 columns x 1 row"). The same trick also works on a GoogleDocs document.


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