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I am a linguist who works on aboriginal languages with very few
speakers. I need to write down their folktales and translate *each*
word separately, right under it. For example,

Rubana-cu ya umusalu
dawn-ed when rained
'When it dawned, it rained.'

Obviously, the words in the first and second lines need to line up
right under each other. Tables are good for that.

The problem is with stories that are longer than one line. If I
continue typing the story, I want the TABLE CELLS from Lines 1 AND 2 to
wrap TOGETHER, as a pair. For example:

Rubana-cu ya umusalu. Masi sumusumukulu kia. Maaru ucani.
Ilaku ya
dawn-ed when rained then enemy came exist
one I tried

turukuuka. Ku-aku acalia puritongatonga.
kill not-I know throw.spear

'When it dawned, it rained. Then the enemy came. There was one that I
tried to kill. But I didn't know how to throw the spear.'

I don't want to create a new table for each line, because I often have
to cut and past these folktales into documents with different page
sizes, margins, etc. I don't want to have to redo the tables every
time; I just want this wrapping capability.

Does anybody know how to do this, or does anyone know how to work
around this problem? Or a macro?

I am trying to use NeoOffice, but if it works only in Word, I'll use
that.

Thanks a lot. You're helping to document and save dying languages!

Okay, something got messed up when this message got posted to the
list--

"Maaru ucani" [end of line 1] was supposed to be aligned above its
gloss, "exist one," and "Ilaku ya" [now its own line 2] was supposed to
be grouped with "turukuuka" [now line 5], and the glosses should have
read "I tried kill" for "Ilaku ya turukuuka."

This is *exactly* the sort of problem I have when moving stories from
one document to another. I'm trying to avoid this by having wrapping
tables or something of the sort.

Any ideas?

Paula Radetzky wrote:

> I am a linguist who works on aboriginal languages with very few
> speakers. I need to write down their folktales and translate *each*
> word separately, right under it. For example,
>
> Rubana-cu ya umusalu
> dawn-ed when rained
> 'When it dawned, it rained.'
>
> Obviously, the words in the first and second lines need to line up
> right under each other. Tables are good for that.
>
> The problem is with stories that are longer than one line. If I
> continue typing the story, I want the TABLE CELLS from Lines 1 AND 2 to
> wrap TOGETHER, as a pair. For example:
>
> Rubana-cu ya umusalu. Masi sumusumukulu kia. Maaru ucani.
> Ilaku ya
> dawn-ed when rained then enemy came exist
> one I tried
>
> turukuuka. Ku-aku acalia puritongatonga.
> kill not-I know throw.spear
>
> 'When it dawned, it rained. Then the enemy came. There was one that I
> tried to kill. But I didn't know how to throw the spear.'
>
> I don't want to create a new table for each line, because I often have
> to cut and past these folktales into documents with different page
> sizes, margins, etc. I don't want to have to redo the tables every
> time; I just want this wrapping capability.
>
> Does anybody know how to do this, or does anyone know how to work
> around this problem? Or a macro?
>
> I am trying to use NeoOffice, but if it works only in Word, I'll use
> that.
>
> Thanks a lot. You're helping to document and save dying languages!


You can't do that with a table.
I've made an example to show another option:
http://here.locusmeus.com/temp/paula.html

I've tested it in Opera, Firefox and IE6, but MacIE will probably make
the floats full width, resulting in only one set of words per line.

--
Els http://locusmeus.com/
Sonhos vem. Sonhos vão. O resto é imperfeito.
- Renato Russo -

On Sun, 18 Feb 2006, Paula Radetzky wrote:

> I am a linguist who works on aboriginal languages with very few
> speakers. I need to write down their folktales and translate *each*
> word separately, right under it. For example,
>
> Rubana-cu ya umusalu
> dawn-ed when rained
> 'When it dawned, it rained.'

It seems to me that Ruby annotation is just what you need for this.
http://www.w3.org/TR/ruby/

Examples here http://www.i18nguy.com/unicode/unico...mple-ruby.html
work with MSIE for the moment. There is a (somewhat flakey) plugin
available for Mozilla.

For the time being, you could perhaps make PDF files to be viewed by
those whose browsers don't support it.

For authoring, other than hand-coding the tags, I'm aware that Amaya
says it supports authoring Ruby annotation, although I haven't tried
it.

On Sun, 19 Feb 2006, Alan J. Flavell wrote:

> For the time being, you could perhaps make PDF files to be viewed by
> those whose browsers don't support it.

I meant that you could display your Ruby on a browser which *does*
support it, and print the result to PDF file. Just in case this
wasn't obvious: I didn't mean two separate authoring processes.

On Sun, 19 Feb 2006, Alan J. Flavell wrote:

> It seems to me that Ruby annotation is just what you need for this.
> http://www.w3.org/TR/ruby/

Hmmm, for your requirements in fact the CSS stylesheet which is
suggested at:
http://www.w3.org/People/mimasa/test...2-inline-table
turns out to be effective.

With this particular stylesheet, the annotations are positioned above
the words to which they refer, rather than below, but a slight
adjustment of the stylesheet could change that if you wanted.

I've added some colouring to the annotations, but this is of course
entirely optional! Also I increased the annotation's font size from
the suggested 60%, to 75%.

I threw together a quick demonstration, which seems to give reasonable
results on Mozilla 1.7, Opera 8.52, etc. as well as IE6, and displays
the desired fallback behaviour on non-supporting (or
stylesheet-disabled) browsers.

http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/www/umusalu.html

In practice of course you should be putting appropriate lang= (or
xml:lang= if you use XHTML) attributes on all of the affected
elements.

regards

Alan J. Flavell wrote in
< c.uk>

> On Sun, 19 Feb 2006, Alan J. Flavell wrote:
>
>> It seems to me that Ruby annotation is just what you need for this.
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/ruby/
>
> Hmmm, for your requirements in fact the CSS stylesheet which is
> suggested at:
>
http://www.w3.org/People/mimasa/test...2-inline-table
> turns out to be effective.
>
> With this particular stylesheet, the annotations are positioned above
> the words to which they refer, rather than below, but a slight
> adjustment of the stylesheet could change that if you wanted.
>
> I've added some colouring to the annotations, but this is of course
> entirely optional! Also I increased the annotation's font size from
> the suggested 60%, to 75%.
>
> I threw together a quick demonstration, which seems to give reasonable
> results on Mozilla 1.7, Opera 8.52, etc. as well as IE6, and displays
> the desired fallback behaviour on non-supporting (or
> stylesheet-disabled) browsers.
>
> http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/www/umusalu.html
>
> In practice of course you should be putting appropriate lang= (or
> xml:lang= if you use XHTML) attributes on all of the affected
> elements.

Kudos

--
PeterMcC
If you feel that any of the above is incorrect,
inappropriate or offensive in any way,
please ignore it and accept my apologies.

On Sun, 19 Feb 2006, PeterMcC wrote:

> > http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/www/umusalu.html
>
> Kudos

Ta! It came out rather well, I thought; but to be honest I only really
used a search engine and applied what it found (duly credited). I had
known about Ruby annotation from some time back, but had only started
looking at it more closely when it came up in discussion (see ciwah
discussion with subject "ALT for text?" just over a week back).

Jukka, assuming you'll read this sometime: applying the stylesheet
(http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/ruby-style.css) to your Ruby
sample at http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/ruby.html works quite
well in Mozilla, for example, or Opera.

"Alan J. Flavell" <> wrote:

>http://www.w3.org/People/mimasa/test...2-inline-table
>turns out to be effective.

Be aware that the "inline-table" value is not supported by Gecko or IE.

--
Spartanicus

"Paula Radetzky" <> wrote:

> I need to write down their folktales and translate
> *each* word separately, right under it.

A table appears to be natural markup for this, but as you note,...

> The problem is with stories that are longer than one line. If I
> continue typing the story, I want the TABLE CELLS from Lines 1 AND
> 2 to wrap TOGETHER, as a pair.

I'm not sure whether I understand the description right, but I would
suggest the approach of using a sequence of two-cell tables (2 rows, 1
column) floated to the left. You would put each pair in one table, and
the floating would take care of placing as many items in a row as
possible for a given canvas width. In a sense, this would simulate
display: inline-block.

You could actually do this even in HTML without CSS, though the markup
would become rather verbose, e.g.

<table align="left">
<tr><td align="center" nowrap>Rubana-cu
<tr><td align="center" nowrap>dawn-ed
</table>

but it's simpler to write just

<table><tr><td>Rubana-cu<tr><td>dawn-ed</table>

with CSS like

td { white-space: nowrap;
text-align: center; }
table { float: left; }

(However, the formatting is here so essential that it might be argued
that it should be done in HTML at least as regards to align="left".)

This is not quite as elegant as a Ruby approach, but this is simpler
and extensible: you could have e.g. the original text, pronunciation
information, and translation, for example, in three rows.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html