What is the right way of creating bilingual book with poetry?

Question

I want to create a book with poetry in two columns, side-by-side, in different languages. After some googling, I chose the ledmac and ledpar packages. But then I found myself doing hacks, and I wonder if there is a better way.

In particular, I need the following:

1. Aligned stanzas (in other words, starting lines of stanzas with the same numbers from both columns are at the same height). astanza environment does that.

2. Numbered stanzas (only for the left column). I am using the macro from ledpar documentation:

\newcommand*{\stanzanum}[2][\stanzaindentbase]{%
        \hskip -#1\llap{\textbf{#2}}\hskip #1
        \ignorespaces}
        % Use: \stanzanum{<dimen: whitespace after # of stanza>}{<text: # of stanza>}

\newcommand{\interstanza}{\par\mbox{}\skipnumbering}

1. No line numbers. I set \firstlinenum{999} in the beginning of the document.

2. Footnotes for stanzas. Something like:

   \begin{astanza}
   blablabla
   \end{astanza}
   \stanzafootnote{foobar}
   

   And this is supposed to create a footnote with the number of the stanza. This can be done by creating the counter for stanza number and the macro with this number and \footnotetext.

So, are there any packages that can do it already? Or did I miss something in documentation? Maybe ledmac and ledpar were not the best choice? I find it suspicious that I am writing macros for things that seem to be common tasks.

Thank you in advance. Sorry if the question is stupid.

Answer 1

Not a stupid question at all.

Right now, I can think of something else slightly hacky: Using the longtable package, create a longtable with, say, three columns—one for the stanza counter, one for the first language, and one for the second. longtable supports regular footnotes. Each stanza (or line if you want pagebreaks in the middle of stanzas) could be a table row. You'd probably have to write some advance-stanza-counter macro but that should be pretty easy.

Answer 2

Hum, I don't understand exactly want do you want. Do you want to have a number at every \astanza environment ? and a number in footnote refered to stanza ?

could you send a example what do want to obtain ? If I understand, I could add feature in eledmac/eledpar package (which is to be used instead of ledmac/ledpar, which is depreciated.