Gloss Alignment

This script* can be used to align glosses and their sources in example sentences of the following form:

The script spaces the example and its glosses by applying kerning at the insertion point before the word that should be moved:

The cursor is immediately before the word speelt.

To use the script, simply place the cursor anywhere in the first line and run the script. To line up more than two lines of items, select those lines:

It’s not necessary to select whole lines: anywhere in the first and last lines will do.

Sub-examples are handled as well:

The single requirement is that there shouldn’t be any space characters at the start of sentences or their glosses. So in fact, you can have examples and their glosses at the margin, with no numbers at all.**

Word and gloss separators

The script expects normal spaces as word and gloss separators. There mustn’t be any spaces at the start of lines and there mustn’t be any spurious spaces – line-final spaces and strings of two or more spaces. (The assumption is that by the time you align example sentences all these spurious spaces have been cleared out.)

If the number of spaces in the example and its gloss do not match, the script shows an alert and exits. Fix the problem and run the script again. When fixing a problem, take into account two special cases, compound words and blanks, which we’ll discuss now.

Compound words and compound glosses

Because spaces are considered word bounderies, we need some way to ignore spaces in compound words when the gloss is a single word and, conversely, when a single word’s gloss is a compound word:

In this example we made the compound nog steeds a single word by replacing the normal space with a non-breaking space.

This example could be fixed in a different way as well. Because the non-breaking space is in fact considered a word, we can use it as a word placeholder:

In this example the non-breaking space is a placeholder gloss for steeds.

Blanks

Similarly, in examples that contain material that should not be glossed, you can use non-breaking spaces as placeholders to create blanks:

Hyphens

Some authors and/or publishers require that glossed morphemes are aligned separately:

Here the gloss -3SG is aligned with the mopheme -t. To enable this, open the script file and in change this line:

var lineUpHyphens = false;

change false to true. Save the script as a plain-text file.

Asterisks, question marks, brackets, etc.

A sentence-initial asterisk (to indicate ungrammaticality) is unindented so that the first word’s gloss aligns properly:

The unindent is done by changing the tab stop in the first line.

Similarly, glosses to bracketed words are moved to the right a bit so that the gloss aligns properly:

These cases are handled differently. The bracket is copied to before the gloss ‘his’ and the document’s [None] swatch is applied to it.

Troubleshooting

In my experience the only problem is sometimes that the numbers of spaces (and/or hyphens) don’t match. To find the problem, show the hidden characters (Type > Show hidden characters) and zoom in so that you can see the space characters. Don’t forget to use non-breaking spaces in compound words and to handle blanks.

Notes

* This script started life in the 1990s as a WordPerfect macro. I converted it to JavaScript when InDesign first supported it, and I have used it extensively in my typesetting work, which consisted mostly of linguistic texts – a lot of typology books with many foreign-language examples, syntax and morphology books, and linguistics journals. I must have set tens of thousands of glossed examples. This script has been one of the most important time savers for me.

** You’ll have noticed that the script could be used to set matrices:

To change the width of the gutters, open the script file, look for To increase the gutter, and follow the instruction there.

Version history

23 Oct. 2025: Posted.

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