[libreoffice-users] Glosses in linguistics

Linguists frequently need to write glosses. Here are a couple examples
using Spanish as the source language and English as the language that
the author is writing in:

Todos     iremos       a   la                     playa.
All.m.pl  go.1.pl.fut  to  the.art.sg.fem  beach
'We will all go to the beach.'

Juan no     sabía                    qué    hacer.
John neg.  know.1.sg.imperf  what  do.inf
'John didn't know what to do.'

(Note that there are rules for how the gloss abbreviations are supposed
to be abbreviated and used, and for the sake of simplicity in the above
examples I did not always follow them rigorously.)

Glosses are typically three lines, as in the above examples. Each
component of the first two lines must be lined up. Here in e-mail I
tried to do this with the space bar, but the results may not appear
perfectly as I intended for all people on this list. They don't even
appear lined up for me because I use a proportional font in my mail
client.

The only way I know to get this right is to use tabs, but the tab
spacings have to be changed for each gloss. If you have a lot of
glosses in your paper tabs will quickly become a serious pain.

I searched the Help, but came up empty-handed. Any suggestions?

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