Re: Interlinears

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). I don't
know if it does better than anything else, though it claims to "support
both simple and complex ruby markup"...

http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_rubysupport.html.en

>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.

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. 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).

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.)

>Kura and Shoebox can do it, too, but again it's a bit of
> a  learning curve.
--
Tristan.

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