They’re unusual in legal documents, but I don’t object to columns in a long document like a contract or a settlement agreement. Columns are an easy way to get a shorter and more legible line length without having to use large margins. On a standard 8.5″× 11″ page, two or three columns are fine; four is too many.
Usually columns look neatest when the rows of text are aligned vertically between columns. Look at a decent newspaper for an example. Getting this result takes a little extra effort. Note your line spacing and make sure any space between paragraphs works out to a whole multiple of the line spacing.
Hi, here in Eastern Europe when drawing up international contracts we use columns a lot for bilingual documents. I can mail you a redacted sample. The thing is — I am a big fan of good typography in legal documents and I despise those columns. This is for two reasons: First, English being a laconic, business-oriented language always produces shorter clauses than Eastern Slavic Languages. This produces ugly results. Second, the letters of the two languages are rather different in look and feel. This also breaks the harmony of the document. This is also aggravated by big documents with complex structures having three or more levels of clauses etc. It would be interesting to get your opinion on this
Usually, columns are meant for continuous reading: you get to the end of one column and go to the top of the next.
But in the bilingual context, I assume you’re using columns to achieve “parallel” typesetting — meaning, showing how the same clause looks in two languages. For instance, this is how I’ve seen laws of Canada typeset: as two columns running in parallel, one in English and one in French.
What makes this a complicated typesetting job is that each document wants to be treated as a single continuous text flow, but then you also have to maintain points of “vertical synchronization” to account for differences in language length, etc. In a professional page-layout program, it would be merely annoying to accomplish. In MS Word, it would be deadly.
I think what I would do is set up two documents in MS Word — one for each language — and use hard page breaks and section breaks to keep parts of the document synchronized, so page X of one document would always correspond to page X of the other. This would allow more relaxed typesetting within the page.
Then, at the end, I would convert both documents to PDF and interleave the pages with Acrobat (it wouldn’t be hard to write a script that would do this automatically).