On Thu, 7 Oct 2010 14:03:57 -0500, "McCollum, Adam" <acmccollum...@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 -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
