lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee) (12/04/88)
I've been working on a program to format interlinear glossed text for printing. When it's in good enough shape that it might possibly of use to anyone, I'll post it, but now I could use some help. First, if anyone has some texts on-line with interlinear glosses they could send me, this would let me exercise the program and maybe adapt it to input conventions it doesn't know about yet. Second, I'm in the market for ideas about good ways to incorporate a free translation into the format, in addition to word-by-word glosses. The basic idea of the program is to process texts as they might have been typed using a text editor, where there are pairs of lines, each of which has one line of foreign text and one line of glosses, with one or several gloss words aligned below each word of foreign text. TeX commands are added to permit printing with proportional fonts, preserving approriate vertical alignments between the foreign words and the gloss words. Here is what some input text I've practiced on looks like (samples courtesy of David Stampe): BO-mAndra-n kAlkAl lAbO-n-ji dE-l-e. KAlkAl-An-ApsAle One-man-art hard field-art-pl be-past-imps. Difficulty-art-due_to A-taGlij-An kAJid-l-E. Atiki anin Okk+d-An paG-l-E. poss-cow-art die-past-3s. Later he another-art buy-past-3s. ... In the printed version, different fonts are used for the foreign text and the glosses, the glosses are centered below the word they go with (or if the foreign word is shorter, it is centered above the glosses), and for the above kind of running text, the lines are re-broken into appropriate lengths (by TeX). The TeX construction is simple in principle: the text is gathered into a string of vertical boxes, each of which contains a foreign word and gloss words below it, and TeX takes care of the rest. (Greg Carter suggested this idea to me.) Now, how about free translation? It might appear in the original text as third lines, given below the glosses, or at the right margin, like this: Aboy tAlajba-n Asu-mAd-le dO AsOG-mAd-le. | A certain old man One old man-art sick-eye-pa and shit-eye-pa. | had an eye disease | and his eyes ran. AbOy dinna-n anin tulAb-liG-An | One day he went One day-art he woods-in-art | into the woods, | but he had a very ... or maybe in other ways. Similarly, in the printed output, one might like to have free translation appear interlinearly, or at the right margin. I know of one way of getting it at the right, which is to follow the example given in the TeXbook on page 387, and adjust the width taken up by the marginal text in such a fashion that the vertical space taken up by it and the text on the left is the same. This looks pretty good. It's not obviously the best method. At the moment, I have no good idea how to align a free translation interlinearly in running text. Comments, anyone? Suggestions? Samples? Thanks in advance, Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu