Latex: Five Line Gloss for Linguistics Typesetting

In the midst of building my conlang for a class, I’ve ended up with a disparate collection of Word documents for various sections of my language. I figured it’d be a good time to compile everything into a nice LaTex document from hereon for future-proofing purposes (and of course, it looks much nicer to read).

IPA Symbols

I started off using the TIPA package. It’s quite convenient with the reference chart once you get the hang of it. However, it started becoming unwieldly halfway, in particular I found it difficult to get \tipa to work with glossing.

I have since changed to Unicode on XeLaTex. I think

If you need more reasons to switch over to the dark side, here is a good list of reasons why you should. To quote Jason Zentz, [ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən] is much more readable (wait for it) than \textipa{[""Ekspl@"neIS@n]}.

Glossing

I started with gb4e and cgloss4e. The issue here is that gb4e is limited to only 3 line glosses, including the header, and my class needs a 5 line gloss. There did not appear to be a straightforward workaround to the problem.

Instead I switched to expex. expex provides approximately 3 gloss line classes, but they can be re-used to give more lines if necessary. For instance:

\ex
    \begingl
    \gla dʊro pa jʊma je jʊkmʊha {}//
    \glb dʊro pa jʊma je jʊk- mʊha//
    \glb 3\tss{RD}p.male NOM 1\tss{ST}p ACC HUM-HUM see//
    \glc He {} me {} {} see//
    \glft `He sees me'//
    \endgl
\xe

This gives a rather nice five line gloss:

It is also possible to modify the styles of \gla, \glb, and \glc respectively with the expex package. The full documentation can be found here.

Note: \tss{} is a shorthand for \textsuperscript{}. Typing less is always great Note2: The \ex environment aligns words vertically using whitespaces. Empty ‘word’ spaces need to be highlighted using {}, which I guess is reasonable.

Fonts

I’m rendering my work on ShareLatex. To use Unicode symbols, we have to compile using XeLaTex instead of the default LaTex. Then, a Unicode supporting font needs to be used as well. In this case, I’m using Charis SIL. To get the fonts to work, upload the downloaded fonts to the project directory, and make some adjustments to the settings in the header of the document:

\usepackage{expex}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont[
    BoldFont={CharisSIL-B.ttf},
    ItalicFont={CharisSIL-I.ttf},
    BoldItalicFont={CharisSIL-BI.ttf}
]{CharisSIL-R.ttf}