Gloss is a tool for interlinear annotation of texts. It arose from my frustration with existing tools, and from my desire to have a tool that works just right. I have logged countless hours interlinearizing texts, and Gloss is as efficient a tool as I can create for that purpose.

• Gloss User Guide (PDF, 258 KB)

• Support for analysis
  • Efficient transcription and glossing
  • Easy-as-possible morphological analysis
  • Basic support for syntactic annotation
  • Full-featured, fast search capability
• Open data formats
  • Lexical information stored in a SQLite database.
  • Texts stored in XML FlexText files.
  • These two files stored in a (surprisingly compact) zip archive.
• Speed & efficiency
  • No appreciable delays in the user interface once the text is loaded.
  • Efficient switching between baseline and gloss tabs.
  • Gloss does not get slower the more texts you add in your database.
  • Working with an interlinear analysis of a 288-line, 2643-word text takes about 104 MB of memory on my computer.
• Import files
  • Import glossed files from Language Explorer — Gloss will store the text forms and gloss forms for you. No data lost.
  • Import ELAN files — Gloss will let you play the intervals associated with the text, just by double-clicking on the line number
  • Import plain text files (if you tell Gloss which writing system to use)

Gloss owes a tremendous conceptual debt to Language Explorer, but is also geared toward overcoming Language Explorer's weaknesses. In particular:

• It is impossible (or possibly just very awkward) to have separate IPA transcriptions of words with identical orthographic form.
• Language Explorer gets slower the more texts you add.

Since Gloss is build with the Qt framework, it should work on platforms that Qt supports (Windows, Unix/Linux, Mac). Beyond the Qt libraries, Gloss requires the following external libraries:

• libexslt
• libxslt
• libxml2
• libquazip

The first three dependencies are easily installed:

sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev
sudo apt-get install libxslt-dev

Quazip is a bit trickier because you need to build the source. (For me, it was necessary to install the “qt4-dev-tools” package in order to build quazip.)

Gloss is created with the Qt application framework, released under the GNU Public License. That means, among other things, that you are free to download it and use it, but not to re-sell it.

Qt is a cross-platform framework, so there is the possibility for using this on Mac OS X, Linux, etc. Right now I only have Windows executables because I only have a Windows machine. Perhaps some do-gooder will build versions for other operating systems and send them to me.

I build in Windows with this, which assumes that Qt is installed and visible in your path:

qmake -config release
mingw32-make

Of course your system would have something different from “mingw32-make”—probably just “make”—if you are not building from Windows using MinGW.