Aboriginal languages & wrapping table cells themselves

[Paula Radetzky]

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!

 

[Paula Radetzky]

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?

 

[Els]

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.

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

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/unicode-example-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.

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

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.

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

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/schemas/NOTE-ruby-implementation#css2-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

 

[PeterMcC]

Alan J. Flavell wrote in

Hmmm, for your requirements in fact the CSS stylesheet which is
suggested at:
http://www.w3.org/People/mimasa/test/schemas/NOTE-ruby-implementation#css2-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

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

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.

 

[Spartanicus]

http://www.w3.org/People/mimasa/test/schemas/NOTE-ruby-implementation#css2-inline-table
turns out to be effective.

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

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

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.

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

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

Thanks. The "simple Ruby markup" works pretty well, I'd say, in all
the browsers I tried (including those which only display the fallback
behaviour). IE implements it natively, and doesn't seem to let itself
be disturbed by the trick stylesheet. Mozilla, Firefox and Opera
produce quite a reasonable rendering, I'd have said.

But when we get to the "complex Ruby markup", it's a different story.
MSIE produces a total mess, and there is no fallback behaviour in
non-supporting browsers.

I guess it's more by good luck than by design that Mozilla gives an
impression of doing what was intended. The initially displayed result
looks strangely convincing, but any attempt to fiddle with it shows
that the rendering is highly unstable. Strange that the results on
Mozilla and Firefox are sufficiently different from each other to
suggest that they must have different code versions in their
rendering. Equivalent versions of Mozilla on Windows and on Linux
gave the same results as each other, though.

If you have any suggestion for improving the practical results, feel
free. Would you anticipate any benefits by trying to follow the ideas
which you set out here? -
http://www.spartanicus.utvinternet.ie/centered_image_gallery_with_captions.htm

I've more than run out of time, seeing that I've got a day job to
attend to, but don't hesitate to take a copy of what I've done so far,
if you feel tempted to hack it. (The copyright mark is an automatic
formality in this context AFAIAC.)

The actual ruby markup seems to be purpose-built for doing what
the O.P requested; if it's currently impractical to deploy it, at
least in its complex variant, that's a shame really. (I guess one
could process the Ruby through some kind of transformation which
produced actual table markup resembling what was suggested by Jukka,
so as to get something that would work in practice, but without having
to abandon the Ruby markup as the actual source.)

cheers

 

[Spartanicus]

If you have any suggestion for improving the practical results, feel
free. Would you anticipate any benefits by trying to follow the ideas
which you set out here? -
http://www.spartanicus.utvinternet.ie/centered_image_gallery_with_captions.htm

I can't contribute, I don't have the OP's post or any direct follow ups
(GG filter), plus I'm not familiar with Ruby so I've only skimmed the
replies that I do have.

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?G=E9rard_Talbot?=]

Paula Radetzky wrote :

I am a linguist who works on aboriginal languages

What are the Aboriginal language names?

with very few
speakers. I need to write down their folktales and translate *each*
word separately, right under it.

One question (and it's an important one): why do you need to provide a
translation for *each* word separately?


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.

Is there a particular reason as to why you use NeoOffice?

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

Do you have a webpage which we could look at? To see how you do your
webpage?

Gérard