Two identical pages per printed page, side by side

[Cwestpha]

I have a crazy business practice to follow inherited from Word documents. This is a printed document with pages sized 4.25 x 5.5. This has traditionally been accomplished in Word by manually creating tables with two columns each spanning 50% of the page. Each column is filled with the same content.

The result is that you can print the document to landscaped 8.5" x 11" paper, cut each page in half, then collate to get two copies of the document.

I know I can use snippets to keep duplicated content in sync but I'm going nuts trying to format this in such a way that there is contiguous numbering for the procedures on each side of the page.

I think I have a solution using a table (I hate doing this), right floats inside for side by side image and text and then custom <p> tags for each side to keep numbering distinct and consistent. This might work but my SMEs will never be able to touch the content because the structure will be so complex that the GUI can't handle it, all edits must be done directly in the XML.

Anyone have a better idea? Ideally I would pour a single topic into the same page layout twice, once on each side, but I do not believe this is possible.

[GregStenhouse]

Duplicate each topic in the TOC, with a two-column page layout, and a column break before each heading?

[Cwestpha]

Hrm, I suppose that could work, assuming I split the topics into single page chunks. I will try that out, thanks!

If anyone has ideas please share!