Re: [jats-list] Markup for linguistics (glossed text)

[Debbie Lapeyre <dalapeyre@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Michael--

Ouch! No you are not overlooking anything obvious. The problem
is that, although you ask for "semantically reasonable", you
really want presentation markup. JATS does not do presentation,
by design or very well.

 - My first thought is a table, which this certainly looks like
   to me. But I do see your problem.

 - If it has to present EXACTLY this way, another obvious
   (but less than perfect) choice is <preformat>. That would
    - force this into a monofont (sorry about that)
    - preserve all your alignments and whitespace
    - let you include the italics, bold, and stuff.

 - Another possibility (not in NLM 3.0, but in the brand new
   JATS 1.1d1) is using <ruby>, which has a base (<rb>) and a
   ruby text annotation (rt) traditionally displayed atop the
   base (rt), or inside parenthesis after the base for browsers
   that cannot handle Ruby. Ruby is part of HTML5, as well as
   part of JATS. Ruby markup is intended for textual annotation,
   and might fit this case very well.

But I've got to tell you, I found this example incredibly hard to
human parse and be sure what went with what and why were these 2
clusters parallel and that one all alone? When the top line and the
bottom line both had values, I was fine, but sometimes... Whatever
you decide, a few horizontal lines or just more white space between
the lines and/or less between the line and its gloss, would help
me to separate.

--Debbie


On Nov 19, 2013, at 4:17 PM, Michael Boudreau <mboudreau@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> Has anyone tackled the problem of marking up textual illustrations that
> require multiple points of vertical alignment--the sort of thing for which
> you9d set tab stops on a typewriter or word processor?
>
> I9m working on a linguistics journal that has lots of glossed text
> illustrations that are typeset like the items labeled (3) and (4) on this
> page image:
>
>   http://mss.uchicago.edu:81/mrb/linguistics.png
>
> We9re using the NLM Journal Publishing 3.0 DTD, and I9m at a loss for a
> markup solution that seems semantically reasonable and illustrates the
> relationships between the chunks of text that the typesetting makes
> obvious. I9ve considered table markup, but I don9t want to break a single
> sentence or other unit of meaning into multiple table cells across a row.
> When I consider how our online host would convert XML into HTML, I see
> only the same bad option.
>
> Am I overlooking something obvious?
>
> --
> Michael R. Boudreau
> Electronic Publishing Technology Manager
> The University of Chicago Press
> 1427 E. 60th Street
> Chicago, IL 60637
> (773) 753-3298
> www.journals.uchicago.edu
>


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Deborah A Lapeyre              mailto:dalapeyre@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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