XPP Bilingual Merge Overview
SDL's Bilingual Merge option (blmerge) enables you to produce documents containing text in two languages, positioned either side-by-side on a page or on facing pages. The option tracks both languages and vertically aligns the two sets of text.
Bilingual merge makes its determination of how the languages should vertically align based on a "primary" and "secondary language". Bilingual merge uses the language where the text runs longer as the standard for vertical alignment — the primary language. The language where the text runs shorter will be the secondary language.
Bilingual merge works by composing the text of the primary language in the main text stream and then returning to the secondary language and composing its text in the story stream. The Magazine Layout option is used to create a "story" stream for the secondary language. The Bilingual Merge option supports XML/SGML as well as standard XSF.
The utility that is run after composing the primary language text in the main text stream and secondary language text in the story stream is "blmerge". The blmerge utility performs a one-to-one match of tags/elements. For each tag/element in the primary language text, blmerge finds a matching tag/element in the secondary language text, then vertically aligns both languages.
Process Overview
The following is an overview of the Bilingual Merge process:
- Create rules in the Page Layout Spec for main text pages (primary language) and galley pages (secondary language).
- Create rules in the Page Column Override Spec to tell the utility where to place text within the blocks defined by the Page Layout Spec.
- Create rules in the Item Format Spec to define tags/elements that end a line, block or page and identify the hyphenation language to use for the primary and secondary language.
- Enter the primary (longer) language in the main text stream and the secondary (shorter) text on galley pages in the story stream on an XPP Workstation or by importing XML or ASCII files.
- Compose and paginate the primary language text on main text pages and the secondary language text on galley pages in the story stream.
- Run the blmerge utility to perform a match and apply vertical alignment of tags/elements. This can be run as a Division Tool or from the Command Line.
Recommended Training
Training for the Bilingual Merge option and the necessary components of the Magazine Layout option will take approximately 3 days for an intermediate user. Fully integrating Bilingual Merge and determining import requirements and specific customisations will take longer, due to the numerous publishing requirements.
XPP Documentation
For more information, please see the XPP documentation Bilingual Merge (bilngmrg.pdf).
Licensing Information
The Bilingual Merge option requires the Magazine Layout option. The Bilingual Merge option and the Magazine Layout option are licensed per user on a per concurrent user basis to access the license from a given server.