interlinear in Open Office
Beth B
The people I've talked with who have tried it have found that there
is too much space between the lines of the interlinear, and almost no
space between the bundles. That is, Word/Morpheme/Lex Entry rows are
too far apart from each other, but the bottom of one set bumps up
against the top of the next sentence/row/line, however you want to
call it.
Is there a way to adjust this in the Styles? I'm not familiar with
Open Office, so I don't know how one does that. I was just wondering
if anyone had had success with it.
A student I know needs interlinearized texts for the appendix of her
MA thesis, but so far hasn't found a good export option. Can any of
you tell me what you do that works well for you?
-Beth
Allan Johnson
Hi Beth,
We've dealt with things like this in our Field Methods class in Manila.
In one sample I'm looking at, what we did to add space between the
bundles is:
Format; Styles and Formatting;
Select the "Interlin Words" style; right click; Modify;
Indents & Spacing tab; Line Spacing; Leading; .08
This puts space above every wrapped piece of the interlinear bundle
(including the first piece, so it will also add to the space under the
title).
Once all the styles are tweaked to look just the way you want, you can
readily create a template that can be attached the next time you export
the texts, or when you export any other texts, so it's not necessary to
manually make the same adjustments again. I'll attach two sample
templates that we used in class. To attach one of these templates and
try it out:
Format; Styles and Formatting;
Click the button in the upper right corner of the Styles and
Formatting dialog box;
Load Styles; (x) Overwrite; From File;
Navigate to the place where you've put the attached .ott files;
Files of type: ODF Text Document Template
Select one; Open
About the MA thesis, two interlinear formats available for export from
FLEx are Word 2003 and OpenOffice formats. Most normal documents can
readily be converted back and forth between Word and OpenOffice, but
this isn't the case for the interlinear format. This is because the
interlinear format uses advanced features that haven't yet been
standardized, so different approaches were required to make interlinear
texts work successfully in both Word and OpenOffice. So it's necessary
to decide in advance which format you want for the interlinear text, and
choose one or the other of these exports accordingly. There's a problem
with the Word format, that Word is unable to automatically set the size
of its text boxes to fit the contents. A Word macro has been developed
to handle this setting of text box sizes. But the macro is slow, and
it's an extra step that I'd rather not have to take. So I prefer the
OpenOffice format. Another advantage of the OpenOffice format is that it
has more flexibility in being able to hide any line that you decide not
to include in your printout, just by tweaking the styles. The attached
7-line interlinear templates could readily be adjusted in this way to
make 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6-line templates. This can be done to some extent in
Word as well, but it doesn't come out right when you try to hide all of
the morpheme level lines.
Assuming that the thesis is in Word 2003, here are some options that
could be considered for the interlinear texts:
- Export the texts in Word format and use the macro that comes with FLEx
to resize the interlinear text boxes.
- Convert the thesis to OpenOffice, export the texts in OpenOffice
format, and avoid the need for the macro.
- Since it's an appendix that she's working with, it might be fine to
print the texts as a separate document independent of the thesis. In
this case she could leave the thesis in Word, while using OpenOffice for
the appendix. But this won't be adequate if she will need to copy and
paste any examples from the appendix to the body of the paper. To do
this, the body and appendix need to be in the same format.
If the thesis is in a version of Word older than Word 2003, it will be
necessary to upgrade to Word 2003 (or use OpenOffice instead) before any
of the interlinear formatting will work.
If the thesis is in a version of Word newer than Word 2003, it might
work. I haven't yet tried this.
Allan
Beth B
Thanks for all of that! I had hoped the style could be tweaked, but
I didn't know enough about OOo to even know where to look.
This particular is much more comfortable with the OOo export than the
Word export, so no worries there.
There were users in SE Asia who also wanted to use OOo, but were not
happy with the lack of space between lines, so I'll pass this on to
them too.
Thank you!!
-Beth