[XeTeX] Interlinear rtl text

[maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu]

Gareth Hughes wrote:
> I'm looking for a possible XeTeX solution for typesetting interlinear
> text.

We're also doing interlinear with a r2l script for Urdu, but we took a
different approach: For the word-aligned part, we'll be using a
romanization, and consign the right-to-left text to an un-aligned row. 
Sort of like:

   txet tpircs udrU si sihT
   This    is      aligned romanized text.
   this-SG be-PRES the     gloss     line
   "This is the free translation."

(I'm writing English right-to-left to simulate Urdu text.)

We haven't actually done this in LaTeX yet, but it seems like it should be
reasonably straightforward.

Our reason for doing it this way is that it wasn't at all clear how we
should do alignment against a right-to-left line of text (assuming that we
wanted to write the glosses in a left-to-right script).  Clearly we would
want to align the glosses with the vernacular text at the word level, but
if we also aligned at the morpheme level, we felt the morpheme ordering
would be confusing regardless of whether we ordered the morphemes
right-to-left or left-to-right.  That is, if we had
   s-klaw
   3sg-walk
it would make the gloss of the suffix look like a prefix, and if we had
   s-klaw
   walk-3sg
it would be difficult to match the morphemes in the r2l script with its
morpheme gloss, particularly in an agglutinating language.


   Mike Maxwell
   CASL/ U MD