Covington example in footnote

Question

I'm using the covingtonpackage to display glossed linguistic examples and it has been working terrifically so far. However, I ran into a problem when I tried to put an example in a footnote. I get the error message Paragraph ended before \towsent was complete. What is the problem here?

The example environment without gloss works fine in a footnote.

    \documentclass{article}
    \usepackage{covington}


    \begin{document}
    Some text.\footnote{This is commented with an example:

\begin{example}
    \gll qaama l-qawm-u illaa zayd-an
stood.up DEF-people but zayd-ACC
\glt `Everyone stood up except for Zayd'
\glend
\end{example}


\begin{example}
This is an unglossed example.
\end{example}

    }

    \end{document}

Trying loading the bigfoot package also. – jub0bs Apr 05 '14 at 14:47 — jub0bs, Apr 05 '14 at 14:47

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 05 '14 at 14:51

The package uses an active end of line, but like any such catcode change (like \verb) it doesn't work in a macro argument. This defines a command \xx that locally defines the commands to pick up an explicit \xnewline token rather than end of line character.

    \documentclass{article}
    \usepackage{covington}

\let\xtwosent\twosent
\let\xthreesent\threesent
\begingroup\lccode`@`\^^M\lowercase{\endgroup
\def\xx{%
\def\twosent##1\xnewline##2\xnewline{\xtwosent##1@##2@}
\def\threesent##1\xnewline##2\xnewline##3\xnewline{\xthreesent##1@##2@##3@}}}
\def\xnewline{ }

    \begin{document}
    Some text.\footnote{\xx This is commented with an example:

\begin{example}
    \gll qaama l-qawm-u illaa zayd-an\xnewline
stood.up DEF-people but zayd-ACC\xnewline
\glt `Everyone stood up except for Zayd'\xnewline
\glend
\end{example}


\begin{example}
This is an unglossed example.
\end{example}

    }

    \end{document}

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 05 '17 at 05:39

Covington 1.3 (just released to CTAN) will provide specific \xgll and \xglll macros that do not fiddle with the line end catcode. Instead, the line must be explicitly terminated by \xgle. Thus, the example above would read:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{covington}

\begin{document}
Some text.\footnote{This is commented with an example:

\begin{example}
\xgll qaama l-qawm-u illaa zayd-an\xgle
       stood.up DEF-people but zayd-ACC\xgle
\glt `Everyone stood up except for Zayd'
\glend
\end{example}

\begin{example}
This is an unglossed example.
\end{example}
}
\end{document}

Covington example in footnote

2 Answers2

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