[XeTeX] parallel lines for multiple text versions

[Gareth Hughes]

Andy Lin wrote:
> You can take a look at the gb4e package (or its predecessor
> covington). It was designed for glosses in linguistics, but the
> mechanism might suit your needs. It takes up to 3 lines of input,
> reads the first word (or group) of each line, puts those in a box,
> then reads the next word and puts those in a box... and so on. In this
> way, long lines will break at the same word/group for all 3 lines.
> 
> The way you could adapt it for your use is to enter the lines
> normally, but group each of them with curly brackets. That will
> prevent the package from separating it into individual words. For long
> lines, make two groups, starting the second group where you want the
> line break to occur.
> 
> -Andy
> 
> On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 22:18, Adam McCollum <acmccollum101 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Dear list members,
>>
>> I have a formatting question. What I would like to do is give line by line
>> three versions of a certain text (in this case, different recensions of the
>> Gospel of Matthew in Ge'ez, i.e. classical Ethiopic). In a WYSIWYG program,
>> I can of course just eyeball where the line breaks need to be and make them
>> manually. The process is somewhat more complicated by the fact that I'd like
>> to have each verse somewhat separated from other verses, and this means that
>> when the verse extends more than one line, the breaks still have to coincide
>> for each version. I'm not sure if I've done a good job explaining what I'm
>> hoping to do, so I attach a PDF sample written in a WYSIWYG program.
>>
>> Many thanks in advance for any help!

I've used covington before with good results. The 'glosses' environment
is useful for setting interlinear glosses, translations etc. I hadn't
heard of the gb4e package Andy mentioned before, but it looks good, and
seems to do the same thing with glosses. Covington can cope with RTL
text too.

Gareth.