Hi, my wife is a PhD student of linguistics. She is currently writing all her stuff in LyX <http://www.lyx.org>, but I am slightly thinking whether it would be possible to convert both of us to OOo (it will have to wait until Bibliographic project <http://bibliographic.openoffice.org> produces at least some code, but that's other question). There are two weird constructs which linguists use and which make things complicated:
a) trees (some example as ASCII-art are here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-bar_syntax), which hopefully could be provided by OODraw, and anything else is probably so complicated, that it wouldn't be possible to do anything better about that. But I can hopefully do something about b) glosses. One very simple gloss can look like this: Neboť tak Bůh miloval svět Because that so [the]God loved [the]world For God so loved the world The point is that an example from a weird language (actually, this is beginning of John 3.16 in my native Czech :-)) is represented in the word-by-word translation into English and then good English translation is provided. Obviously most natural way how to represent this in OOo (or M$-Word for this matter) is table for the first two lines of the text and the third line aligned with this table. I would love to create macro for my wife, which would translate freely written plain text like this Neboť tak Bůh miloval svět Because that [the]God loved [the]world For God so loved the world into the above shown table. There is a macro which does this (and too much more IMHO) in VBA available on <http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/cumming/LingWord/LingWord.dot>. Algorithm is explained on <http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/cumming/WordForLinguists/Interlinear.htm>. This can be summarized into this: 1) Type the example and the gloss, separating the words with spaces, and using an extra space for any item that doesn't correspond to a word in the other line. 2) Select first two lines of the example. 3) Convert selected lines into table via StarBasic equivalent of Table/Convert/Text to table/ (space as a divider between fields). 4) Eliminate all grids around the table, and set width of columns to the widest word in each column (would it be possible to set width of column to automatically adjust with changes in the table?). The biggest problem I have is how to convert text into table in Writer with SBasic. I tried to record macro, but I've got ugly dispatcher-based macro. Is there any OOo API function which would do it for me instead? Does anybody heard about this kind of macro already done? Thanks a lot, Matej -- Matej Cepl, http://www.ceplovi.cz/matej/blog/ GPG Finger: 89EF 4BC6 288A BF43 1BAB 25C3 E09F EF25 D964 84AC Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. -- Albert Einstein --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
