paracol with manyfoot

Question

I try to combine the two mentioned packages, as in the following example:

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{paracol}
\usepackage{manyfoot}

\newfootnote{A}
\newfootnote{B}
\begin{document}

\footnotelayout{m}
\lipsum[1]

\FootnotetextA{}{\lipsum[2]}\FootnotetextB{}{\lipsum[3]} %comment this line and uncomment the following to see the desired results
%\footnotetext{\lipsum[2]}\footnotetext{\lipsum[3]}

\begin{paracol}{2}
\lipsum[4]
\end{paracol}
\lipsum[5]

\end{document}

as can be clearly seen, the results are not quite satisfactory...

if you use the commented-out line instead of the commented-on line (as described in the comment), you get the way it should look like.

I need paracol, since my real work contains many many areas where 2-3 alternative texts reside by each other. I thought about ledmac/ledpar, but I also need the great twosided options of paracol - to switch between left-right columns according to page parity. also the alternatives do not necessarily share the same paragraph structure - they are not parallel versions but full alternatives (even written in different font size sometimes) that should not depend on each other's contents or organization, while ledpar doc seems to insist on paragraph parallelism.

I need manyfoot, simply because my real work will contain multiple types of footnotes: one level is used as yet another way to specify alternative texts, while the other(s) are real short notes. if any alternative exists that works better with paracol, it would be welcome.

Answer 1

You can use the package parcolumns instead of paracol.

The corresponding parcolumns environment seems to be not affected by that strange behavior.

Note that the usage of parcolumns is very similar to paracol, so you shouldn't have any difficulty to switch to it.

Here is your MWE modified with parcolumns:

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{parcolumns}
\usepackage{manyfoot}

\newfootnote{A}
\newfootnote{B}
\begin{document}

\lipsum[1]

\FootnotetextA{}{\lipsum[2]}\FootnotetextB{}{\lipsum[3]} %comment this line and uncomment the following to see the desired results
%\footnotetext{\lipsum[2]}\footnotetext{\lipsum[3]}

\begin{parcolumns}{2}
\colchunk[1]{\lipsum[4]}
\end{parcolumns}

\lipsum[5]

\end{document} 

Output: