Re: Interlinears
| From: | Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, January 5, 2006, 4:18 |
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On Wed, 04 Jan 2006 21:01:19 -0500, Tristan McLeay
<conlang@...> wrote:
> Paul Bennett wrote:
>> I know this subject comes up once in a while, but the situation is (I
>> imagine) prone to change from time to time, so I'm asking again.
>> Is there a good way to do interlinears in either MS Word (including
>> Macros) or HTML (e.g. what's Rubi support like these days)?
>
> There's a package for Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox that implements a fair
> amount of Ruby support (btw: "ruby"'s an English word, not a Japanese
> one, so it's spelt with a -y. A bit like "mora", like that).
Yeah, I know, the word comes from a jargon term for 7pt typeface. I just
had a brainfart and decided it was spelled rubi in Japanese (whereas it's
actually furigana) and that since it is more often used in Japan than
England (or the USA), that's the name I should give it.
We're still talking about a browser-specific solution, which isn't ideal.
Where's all the outrage from SEA about this?
>> I know LaTeX can do it, but that's one heck of a learning curve just
>> for one feature, and AFAICT Unicode support is pretty spotty, as is
>> non-Unicode IPA support.
>
> LaTeX can actually do a much better job of Unicode stuff than people
> give it credit for. If you use the UTF-8 and inputenc packages (along
> with the right font packages), you can get it to do simple Unicode input
> (i.e. basic multilingual plane without combining characters); you can
> even motivate it to do combining characters which I've never tried.
Huh. Well, combining characters are kind of a big deal, for me.
> Obviously the *output* isn't in Unicode, but that doesn't really matter
> much seeing as the output's always in PDFs or DVIs where the font
> encoding doesn't much matter.
Yes.
> In any case, having the output in Unicode is actually not completely
> possible because it uses characters that aren't encoded in Unicode for
> formatting stuff (things like the ffi ligature, Tengwar fonts, obviously
> exactly what depends on the set-up).
I thought ffilig was on the Prime Material Plane. Isn't it? I'd swear I've
seen it, right next to ffllig, in the Alphabetic Presentation Forms. I
*think* there's a place for Tengwar on Plane 1, too, as I recall. There's
quite a vocal elf lobby out there, using words like "serious linguistic
and metalinguistic research" and so on.
> Using something like LyX (a "what you see is what you mean" editor) can
> also drastically reduce the learning curve---but you'll probably still
> need to learn something for the interlinear packages, because I doubt
> LyX would know how to format them. (The final formatting's done by LaTeX
> so it'll always come out the way it's meant to; it's the as-you-go
> formatting that I'm talking about here.)
If I get desperate enough, I'll try LyX again. ISTR trying it, and failing
to install it properly or something, and running away full of fear and
loathing. The plan, should it manifest itself, will be to produce WYSIWYG
docs, and read the "raw" document source to try and help me understand
some of the tutorials online.
Paul
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