temporality in elan reports

Hello,

Is there any way of preserving the temporality of the annotations in different tiers when producing ELAN reports?

We have been working with narratives and conversations in Brazilian sign language and have been having to do our reports manually, using Word or other software.

The mother-tier (of all tiers) is roughly equivalent to a sentence, and we’d like to have the information in all other tiers temporally aligned with this tier (pretty much like we see on the screen).

We’d appreciate any help you can give us on this matter.

Cheers,
Tarcisio (ECS-USP)

Both printing and export as interlinear text file are based on conventions for interlinear text. All annotation values are exported without being cut off (like sometimes happens in the timeline view). But most timing information is lost except for the begin and end time of the annotations on top-level tiers.
This output isn’t very well suited for transcriptions with a lot of single, independent tiers.
For reports a combination of interlinear text and screenshots from the timeline viewer could be an option?

As far as I can see, the only way to create textual output that maintains or visualizes the temporal relation between annotations is to have alignment based on the number of characters, where each character represents a certain number of milliseconds.
The disadvantages would be that annotation values might have to be cut off (like in the timeline viewer) and that there would be rounding inaccuracies.

Would this still be useful?

Han