Interlinear word processing

[George Fowler]

Laszlo Dienes wrote:

>Following Ben Rifkin's questions on good bibliography software and
>Russian spell checkers for the Macintosh, I would like to know if anyone
>knows of any interlinear word processor for the Mac (to produce and print
>bilingual annotated text where your annotations neatly align--vertically--
>with the words of the primary text)?

God! (Istenem!) If anybody finds anything wonderful, let me know. We
produce this kind of formatting for sentential examples published in the
Journal of Slavic Linguistics. For example, we want it to look
approximately like this:

 (3) a. Otveta    ne  pris^lo.
        answer    NEG came
              GEN                [Subscript to the line above]
        'No answer came.'

Using MS Word/Mac 5.1a, we insert tabs to separate the words in the first
two lines, highlight them, and then place tabs to get them as close
together as possible. Not so hard for this example; it can really be a drag
in longer sentences. This is unsatisfactory in srveral respects. Aside from
being labor-intensive, MS Word doesn't handle character spacing well in a
line with lots of tabs, and small words like "ne" are often either spread
out or squashed together, and no amount of manipulation within Word will
fix this.

Loren Billings, in preparing his bibliography (done jointly with Joan
Maling, but he handled most of the hard-core details) used Word tables to
try to achieve the same effect. After playing with his tables a while, we
rejected them for actual production. The problems we noted were: 1) while
it is relatively simple to get tables with uniform cells, it is hard and
even MORE labor-intensive to vary the formatting and spacing of individual
cells; and 2) Word 5.1 doesn't give you nearly as much flexibility in
formatting cells as ordinary text (i.e., paragraphs in Word-speak); this
may not be true of Word 6.0.1, which we own but do not use due to its
all-around kludginess.

TeX is actually not so bad to use, and there is (at least) one outstanding
Mac implementation, called Textures. (Pretty expensive, though.) In
Textures, you can have a WYSIWYG window, where text is displayed in its
output formatting, together with a working TeX window, where you enter all
the formatting commands. It's conceptually a lot like Ventura, the kludgy
page-layout package on the DOS side. There are also shareware and freeware
implementations of TeX for the Mac. Anyway, no mainframe is required;
although an advantage to TeX is that it is more portable than just about
anything else you can use for word processing.

George Fowler

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