Glossing help

[Ryan of Tinellb]

I am writing my sample texts for my language in Microsoft Word. I am trying to follow the Leipzig glossing rules with regards to Rule 1: Word-by-word alignment. It's... not going well. Having alternate lines on different streams (ie: first line original language, second line gloss) is really difficult.

I was just wondering, how do people here do it? Or is there no way to automate, even partially, the process?

[GreenBowTie]

Yeesh, in MS Word? I don't even know how you'd do it. Tabs maybe? Or you could set up invisible tables.

[Ryan of Tinellb]

Or in other programs. Word is so unintuitive for me now, is there something better?

I was having trouble getting Styles and Table Styles working properly, so I've gone back to using tabs. I've spent three hours trying to get the first line of my sample text working properly, when what I actually want to do is have the sample text so I can evolve it into the next language.

[alynnidalar]

Not sure what the problem is--can't you just write a morpheme, hit tab, write the next one, etc., and then do the same in the next row? I've done it in MS Word for awhile now and haven't run into issues. What's happening when you try to type something, hit tab, and write something else? Are the tabs differing widths or something odd going on like that?

[ObsequiousNewt]

Does TeX (or some extension) have support for glossing?

[Hallow XIII]

I am writing my sample texts for my language in Microsoft Word.

Here is your fundamental error.

Does TeX (or some extension) have support for glossing?

I am very sure that there are packages out there to help with this, and even if not writing it yourself is still gonna be less of a pain in the butt than attempting to manually align things in Word.

[gach]

Does TeX (or some extension) have support for glossing?

Not natively obviously, but there are packages to do the job. Here are two possibilities you might look at

http://www.ctan.org/pkg/gb4e
http://www.ctan.org/pkg/expex

Doing basic glosses without complex formatting and automatic numbering is easily done just by using the tabular environment within the text. Notice that you do have to use multicolumn for the free translation to align the gloss neatly above it.

Code: Select all

\begin{tabular}{llll}
Buorre & le-i & go & bohte-t. \\
good & be-SG3.PST & when & come-SG2 \\
\multicolumn{4}{l}{"It was good that you came."}
\end{tabular}

The result will look similar to the glossing tags on this board, just without the automatic bolding:

Buorre

good

le-i

be-SG3.PST

go

when

bohte-t.

come-SG2

"It was good that you came."

You could try using the same table based solution under other text editing systems as well.

[sirdanilot]

I am writing my sample texts for my language in Microsoft Word. I am trying to follow the Leipzig glossing rules with regards to Rule 1: Word-by-word alignment. It's... not going well. Having alternate lines on different streams (ie: first line original language, second line gloss) is really difficult.

I was just wondering, how do people here do it? Or is there no way to automate, even partially, the process?

Just use 'tab' rather than 'space'. Tadaa. It's not that difficult.

Though I would certainly encourage you to use another program if you can (Latex), I am myself only capable of handeling Word. I am just not so good at handeling scripts and code that is required in Latex. Though a friend told me that you can now just type any unicode caracter in latex and it will process it fine, so I might give it a go at some point.

[alynnidalar]

I am writing my sample texts for my language in Microsoft Word. I am trying to follow the Leipzig glossing rules with regards to Rule 1: Word-by-word alignment. It's... not going well. Having alternate lines on different streams (ie: first line original language, second line gloss) is really difficult.

I was just wondering, how do people here do it? Or is there no way to automate, even partially, the process?

Just use 'tab' rather than 'space'. Tadaa. It's not that difficult.

And if all else fails, there's always monospace fonts. I know they're not the nicest of fonts, but something like Consolas already comes with Microsoft Word and looks all right IMO.

[jal]

I am writing my sample texts for my language in Microsoft Word. I am trying to follow the Leipzig glossing rules with regards to Rule 1: Word-by-word alignment. It's... not going well. Having alternate lines on different streams (ie: first line original language, second line gloss) is really difficult.

Use a table. That's basically the only way to do it in Word, apart from tabs, but those don't automatically size.

I was just wondering, how do people here do it? Or is there no way to automate, even partially, the process?

In HTML, I use tables, although I probably should use divs and CSS (which have the added bonus of keeping together source and gloss).

The result will look similar to the glossing tags on this board, just without the automatic bolding:

Waddayano, I never knew these tags existed...


JAL