Proper typesetting and layout of examples and text editions with interlinear morphological glossing is an art. The reader is helped if the following principles are heeded.

Vertical distance

Interlinear glossing occurs not only in isolated examples, but also in text editions. Moreover, a glossed example may occupy more than one line T. Then the reader has the task of figuring out which lines are associated. He is helped in this task by iconic vertical distances between the lines. Assuming that the lines of the canonical trilinear representation in general have the default line-height of the entire text, then the vertical distance above T must be larger than the general line-height.

Rule 28. The vertical distance above T is larger than the default line-height and, in particular, than the distance above the gloss line.

Order

If there are more lines of linguistic representation, for instance annotations of grammatical categories, syntactic constituency, syntactic, semantic or pragmatic functions, these follow the morphological gloss.

Rule 29. The morphological gloss is in the line immediately below the corresponding T.

Text alignment

Words (neither larger nor smaller units) of T are left-aligned with their glosses. If T or the gloss line does not fit in a print line, line-break respects syntactic structure, always in the spirit to support the reader.

Rule 30.

  1. A line of T with its associated gloss and free translation lines are left-aligned (i.e. full justification is suspended).
  2. A piece of L1 text whose length exceeds one print line is broken (not at the right edge of the page, but) at a major syntactic boundary.
  3. Each word form in T is left-flush with the L2 word or complex of symbols rendering it in the gloss line.
    If such an arrangement is impossible, the following is a minimum requirement: A gloss of an element of T is contained in the line immediately below T.
  4. If the L1 text piece occupies more than one print line, its free translation
    • is subdivided into stretches positioned beneath each two-linear pair of T and gloss if the stretches of T and the translation correspond (i.e. to the extent that higher-level syntax of L1 and L2 is analogous)
    • follows the entire multilinear block if this condition cannot be met.

Font size

The gloss line is almost always longer than T. This is because a gloss is a kind of explanation of L1 units by L2 units, and also because almost no grammatical category label can be as short as a grammatical morph. In order to meet Rule 30c (and also to render T more readable and to save space), the gloss line should be set in a smaller font size.

Rule 31. The gloss line should be type-set in approximately 85% of the font-size of T.
If this is impossible, then at least grammatical category labels are in small capitals.

Grammatical category labels

Grammatical category labels must

Rule 32. Grammatical category labels appearing in morphological glosses are abbreviated, without a period at the end, and set in (small) capitals.

Punctuation

Since morphological gloss lines are not sentences, the relevant orthographic rules of punctuation do not apply. In particular, parentheses enclosing optional material in T cannot be repeated in the gloss because there they have a different function (Rule 22).

Rule 33. There is no punctuation in a morphological gloss. Parentheses including optional material in T (although repeated in the free translation) are not repeated in the morphological gloss, either.

Sentence-initial upper case

Since morphological gloss lines are not sentences, the relevant orthographic rules of initial capitalization do not apply.

Rule 34. There is no sentence-initial uppercase in a morphological gloss.

Syllabication

Since the hyphen is reserved for morphological boundaries, it cannot be used for syllabication.

Rule 35. There is no syllabication either in the L1 text or in the gloss.