Reply To: wide side-by-side columns
Thanks for your patience. This page has complex formatting issues to it that I have been considering. I do appreciate the print page that you sent. It's essential for understanding what you are working with and the precise nature of the questions you are asking. I'm going to answer in two parts.
First we'll try that middle section regarding the plural article des. You have referred to it as being in columns. This is not columned material. It looks like columns because it happens to be printed that way, that's all. For purposes of braille formatting this material is neither useful, nor easily read in columns. These are long sentences. What you want to do is to arrange them so that the full sentence can be easily read and the comparison of the article forms is quickly accessible to the reader.
The singlemost difficult issue in foreign language braille is translation and the shifting of one language to another, especially in close proximity. It is easy to visually identify each language and easy for the print reader to see when a shift it made from one language to the other. This is not true in braille and so a number of formats are used to show language shift that include usage of special typeface and the actual formatting of the material. You have described one of these methods with regard to tranlations that are too long for a single braille line. This is NOT a good usage here for these comparison sentences. That format tells the reader translation is taking place and the reader will be poorly served by wasting time discovering that nothing is being translated. Do not use that format here. And these these are not columns, so don't do that.
These sentences are actually examples and should be treated as displayed material. Each pair of sentences is treated as an example with a blank line between. Use 1-3 and appropriate typeface emphasis of the article.
Il achète du vin.
Il n’achète pas du vin.
Je mange de la viande
Je ne mange pas de viande.
The second part of my response will be regarding the translated list and sentences at the bottom of the page that you have referred to as a table. This is not a table, but two lists. There are competing formats here because at least one of these lists is a translated vocabulary which also has formatting requirements. I'll present suggestions for dealing with in the second part.
--Joanna