Formatting Interlinear texts in Word 2013

[Jenni Beadle]

Hi

 

At the SILA school the students are getting ready to do their major assignments next week but we are having trouble formatting their interlinear texts in Word 2013.

 

If we export the text from FLEx as OpenOffice then the text is nicely aligned in text boxes within text boxes and formatted as expected. But many of the students are using Word for their write-ups. When we try to copy the examples to Word 2013 they are a total mess.

-          Simple copy/paste just gives empty text boxes.

-          Opening the odt file in Word gives textboxes with just the baseline text (with no spaces in between).

If we export the text as Word XML 2007 it gives all the text but the style formatting isn’t applied. There is a mixture of fonts and inconsistent line spacing  so the lines don’t line up vertically. I tried modifying the styles but nothing happens.

 

I found in the help that it is a known issue that the style formatting doesn’t appear to work. Unfortunately the workaround suggested doesn’t work either, at least not in Word 2013.

·         Known issues:

o    Sometimes, in Microsoft Word when modifying styles used to stylize the interlinear text that you exported, the effect of the styles may not appear, that is, applying or changing a applied style may have no apparent effect. The work-around seems to be using Undo and then Redo (Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y in Word) to undo and redo the style application.

My current workaround is the select all the text and press ctrl+space to remove manual formatting. Unfortunately that also removes the character formatting but at least everything is consistent and aligned well. But it would be nice to have the vernacular text formatted.

 

Has anyone found a workaround for Word 2013?

 

Thanks

 

Jenni

[Colin Suggett]

Hi Jenni,

I'm sorry that I don't have a ready solution to your problem, however, I do have a suggestion for a long-term solution, perhaps for next semester. This solution is to provide students with some training on how to use Andy Black's XLingPaper approach to linguistic writing. The training investment (I feel) would be fairly minimal but the advantages of using this approach are huge. In particular, this approach frees students up from formatting concerns and allows them to just concentrate on good linguistic writing. Too often the writing process is hindered by formatting concerns like you have mentioned. This should be the least of the students' concerns. 

XLingPaper comes with a number of templates for writing papers and has a number of built-in stylesheets. An SIL school could easily provide their students with an approved stylesheet so that all students could achieve a consistent look for their writing. The program produces PDFs as well as Word or HTML output. 

Flex has a number of XLingPaper interlinear outputs integrated into its program including exporting an entire text.

I am an 'OWL' (ordinary working linguist). In the past, I tried to write papers using Word and I got overwhelmed with the formatting challenges. I switched to XLingPaper and have never regretted the decision. During the past year I worked on my very first paper for publication using XLingPaper. At the time of my writing, I did not know the publisher's formatting requirements, but this did not hinder the writing process since I knew I could simply apply a different style sheet and most of the formatting issues would be solved. All vernacular language needs to be in italic? No problem. All free translations need to be enclosed with single curly quotes? No problem.

For what it's worth,

Colin 

  

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[Allan Johnson]

Hi Jenni,

I don't have much help for you on this - but I can confirm from my own experience that copying from the LibreOffice format into Word never worked for us either, and also that the old "Microsoft Word XML" format (for Word 2003) is only for Word 2003. Which leaves us with just the "Microsoft Word XML 2007" version. For me that one seems to work fine in Word 2010. I heard from another post a while back that there are issues in Word 2008. It sounds like that's the case in Word 2013 as well. But I don't have a way to test out either of those versions. I'm curious - do any of your students use Word 2010, and is the export working for them? If so, maybe a workaround would be to "downgrade" from 2013 to 2010? Does Word let people do that?

I wonder if these issues might be enough motivation to try the XLingPaper approach as Colin is suggesting.

Allan

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[Ron Lockwood]

Hi Jenni,

 

I would also recommend XLingPaper. I’ve written several papers with it and even edited a long book.

 

As to your present problem. Here’s one thing you could try, but it is a little involved. You can export your text to XLingPaper format. Open it in XXE which is the xml editor of choice (see XLingPaper.org), export from that as html and use Word to open the html file. Everything is lined up nicely and you can copy and paste interlinear sentences as you which. Some of the issues with this are that if you want certain formatting, you have to do that in XLingPaper where you can format each line of the interlinear output separately. Another issue is that each interlinear sentence will come out as one line no matter how long it is. You will have to manually break long lines. If you have short sentences, this won’t be an issue.

 

Hope that helps.

 

Ron

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[Dennis Walters]

Hello Jenni and others

I know the following is not exactly what you want, but I think it is worth considering.

Simply have the students download and install LibreOffice/OpenOffice/NeoOffice, then use that for their papers and interlinear work. The license is free for Libre and Open. Cheap for Neo.

These packages offer a rather good solution for cross-platform document exchange, and the formatting features are powerful and effective. MS Word, in any of its versions, has always generated the problem of documents in proprietary formats that either now or later, are not only incompatible with other word-processing software, but may become impossible to read and re-use.

Another problem is that some versions of MS Word have simply not been stable enough when used for exotic language work, for instance using non-Roman scripts, IPA transcription, etc. This kind of work falls outside the standard user profile for Word and sometimes it has not served very well. For instance, I spent a few hours getting a document all set up with the writing systems and styles I needed, only to have MS Word (2003) balk and revert to its default settings. This happened enough times that I could not continue.

Of course, MS Word is familiar and I don't doubt there are reasons for using it, but I don't use MS Word any more except when documents in that proprietary format force me to do it. In fact, there was a little known policy in SIL a few years ago, that recommended a move to documents in open format.

I hope you find a good solution and will be interested to hear what you choose in the end.

Dennis Walters

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[Jenni Beadle]

Hi

 

Thanks for all your comments. I think I finally have a workaround using a combination of template and replace.

 

My workaround

1.       Export the text from FLEx as Microsoft Word 2007 XML

2.       Apply a custom template  Interlinear text.dotx (which has the formatting I want). This fixes the vertical alignment (by applying the same font to all lines) but it does not fix the bold/italic formatting.

3.       Do a Find/Replace by finding the appropriate style and replacing with bold or italic as needed.

 

The various options

 

LibreOffice

Despite trying to push LibreOffice, they still feel more comfortable with the MS Office that they know. I must admit I struggled with LibreOffice in the past until I learned to take off my Microsoft hat when I use it. We don’t have MS Office on our school computers, only LibreOffice and I think we have got the message through to them about the importance of using LibreOffice when working with nationals. But when the pressure is on they are preferring to go back to what they know well and have on their own computers.

 

XLingPaper

I have had a few quick looks at XLingPaper several times before but haven’t been able to work it out myself. So if I can’t do it yet then I won’t be able to show it to them quickly. And as I said when the pressure is on they are preferring to use the MS Office that they know well.

 

Downgrading to MS Office 2010

I found a classroom computer with MS Office 2010. When I exported a text it certainly didn’t have the uneven vertical problem but I found that when I selected a block of text (i.e. a phrase) and applied formatting to it to emphasize it, only the gloss lines changed not the basetext line. So it solved one problem and created another.

 

 

So I will be trying my workaround next week. Their assignment is due on Friday so we will see how it goes. It is a small  group this year but a group of stressed students will definitely test it out and will be sure to find any weaknesses in it.

 

Jenni Beadle

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/flex-list/55713CD4.60308%40sil.org.

[GregT]

It appears that if you change the Word 2007 XML text from Matrix Spacing, Minimum distance between baselines: from Exactly 1pt to Multiple 1.5, you will get bundles of text where the lines are lined up from one bundle to the next. You can do this manually for each bundle or you could apply a XSLT to the exported file.

After the .xml file is exported, I open it in Word and save it as a docx file. I used a program called ODTXSLT to post process the .docx and fix (adjust) the equations in the resulting output. You can get a copy of the installer for this program from: http://pathway.sil.org/wp-content/uploads/SetupOdtXslt-1.15.msi

Once this program is installed, you can add the .bat and .xsl files in the attached .zip file to your desktop. Then the .docx file can be dragged it and dropped on the .bat file. The process will create a copy of the .docx file with a -1 in the name but the original .docx file can be opened and will have all the equations adjusted so the horizontal lines stay aligned.

The styles can be adjusted in the normal way:

1. Click the symbol (circled in orange in the screenshot below) in the lower right of the Styles panel in the tool bar so the styles pane is displayed on the right side of the Word Window.
2. Click in some text on the line to be formatted.
3. The style name will be highlighted in the styles panel with a blue box around it as the "Interlin Cf seh" is in the screenshot below. Right click on this style and click Modify.
   
4. A dialog will open and you can click the "Format" button near the bottom and select "Font" from the pop-up menu.
5. This will open a dialog allowing you to change the color, font and size of all the lines with this style.