Sphinx for writing "parallel text"

Problem: I am trying to write "parallel text" using reStructuredText. By "parallel text", I mean something like annotated works of fiction, where the text is in two columns. The left column contains the main text, and the right column contains commentary. I will be using sphinx for generating HTML and Latex documentation from it.

I have the following requirements:

1. As mentioned above, I should be able to typeset text in two columns, one for the main text and one for the annotations.
2. The annotations can be "sentence level", and will n开发者_开发技巧ot always be "paragraph level". I.e., I want to be able to annotate different sentences in a paragraph, or the whole paragraph.
3. It will be great to have a mode where all the annotations are turned off, so the output HTML and Latex only contains the main text. In this case, I would like to be able to use the whole "real estate" of the medium, rather than just a column.
4. It will be very nice to have a "list of annotations" feature if possible.

I am pretty new to reStructuredText and to Sphinx, but have considerable experience with Python. I am looking for some ideas about how to do what I want to do. I have been reading about reStructuredText and also about writing Sphinx extensions, so writing an extension to Sphinx is not out of question.

Has anyone done something similar before?

Thanks!

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These seem very similar to footnotes? I would suggest having a look at http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2010/04/20/footnotes/

If they suit your purpose, integrating them should not be too difficult. Sphinx outputs footnotes with a special class. Replacing the

$("a[rel='footnote']")

in the code, with a jquery css selector of your choice should give you what you desire.