[XeTeX] parallel lines for multiple text versions

[Andy Lin]

IIRC, gb4e and linguex both use cgloss4e.sty (from covington) as a
base for their gloss commands. They all handle line-breaking the same
way, though they have also implemented different font formatting and
line spacing commands.

-Andy

On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 16:49, maxwell <maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Oct 2010 14:03:57 -0500, "McCollum, Adam"
> <acmccollum101 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Many thanks for the recommendations. I've been looking at Covington and
>> will also take a look at gb4e too. I actually changed Covington to allow
>> more than 3 lines to be lined up, but I'm not sure how it will do with
>> Ethiopic script (this is actually the first time I've done anything with
>> Ethiopic in LaTeX).
>
> FYI, we've used the Covington macros with two Arabic script languages:
> Pashto (which uses more or less the standard Naskh version of the Arabic
> script) and Urdu (which uses the Nasta'liq script, much more difficult to
> typeset).  Since these are written right-to-left, we do the Arabic script
> in a line by itself at the top of the interlinear, then repeat the
> utterance in a left-to-right roman script on the next line.  The roman
> script line is what the gloss line is aligned off of.  We've had no problem
> with this.  Since Ge'ez is written left-to-right, this is something you
> probably don't need to deal with.  But by the same token, we haven't dealt
> with the case of exotic scripts in the aligned lines.
>
> BTW, the Covington macros deal nicely with lines that are too long to fit
> on the page--both unaligned lines, and aligned lines.  If I'm reading the
> documentation of some of these other packages right, this is not something
> they do.  So with the other packages, if a line is too long to fit, you
> have to manually break it.  Maybe someone can confirm that I'm not
> mis-reading the documentation.
>
> We slightly modified the covington.sty file, e.g. removing the italic font
> command.  Perhaps more importantly, we added a "strut" so as to add extra
> vertical space between successive pairs of interlinear lines--i.e. in the
> situation where the macro has split a long line.  This seems to me at least
> to make such interlinears easier to read.  We've tested this for two-line
> interlinears (that is, two aligned lines--not counting the free translation
> or the Arabic script line); we've implemented this for three line
> interlinears, but haven't really tested it.
>
>   Mike Maxwell
>
>
>
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