Vertical alignment with marginnote in covington examples

Question

I am writing a book where I use covington for linguistic Arabic examples in transcription and I use marginnote and babel to have the examples in Arabic script in the margin. I am facing some strange issues.

1. Placeing the marginnote at the beginning of the first glossing line makes the example number and the fist glossing line misaligned, and this seems to increase across exampples (a-c).

2. The marginnote does not align with the first line but is to low. I can adjust this with \marginnotevadjust but they are unaligned by different lengths, so I can't find a set value for this.

3. Addign the marginnote after \item seems more stable alignwise but introduces a new paragraph for some reason (d).

4. Adding the marginnote anywhere but at the beginning of the line in the glossing has odd effects on the label number (e). (Perhaps a directionality issue?)

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{marginnote}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\babelfont[arabic]{rm}{Lateef}
\usepackage{bidi}
\usepackage{covington}
\renewcommand*\covsubexnumber[1]{#1.}

\reversemarginpar

\newcommand{\arnote}[1]{%
  \marginnote{%
    \sloppy
    \upshape
    \footnotesize
    \RL{\foreignlanguage{arabic}{#1}}%
    }%
    }

\begin{document}

\begin{subexamples}

\item
\digloss
  {\arnote{كرة القدم}kurat al-qadam}
  {ball \textsc{def}-foot}
  {football}

\item

\digloss
  {\arnote{كرة القدم}kurat al-qadam}
  {ball \textsc{def}-foot}
  {football}

\item

\digloss
  {\arnote{كرة القدم}kurat al-qadam}
  {ball \textsc{def}-foot}
  {football}


\item\arnote{كرة القدم}
\digloss
  {kurat al-qadam}
  {ball \textsc{def}-foot}
  {football}

\item
\digloss
  {kurat al-qadam\arnote{كرة القدم}}
  {ball \textsc{def}-foot}
  {football}

\end{subexamples}

\end{document}

What are the problems here and is there a better approach to get the desired result?

EDIT: Compiling with xelatex.

Answer 1

Somewhat hacky:

    \documentclass{article}
    
    \usepackage{marginnote}
    \usepackage[english]{babel}
    \babelfont[arabic]{rm}{Scheherazade}
    \usepackage{bidi}
    \usepackage{covington}
    \renewcommand*\covsubexnumber[1]{#1.}
    
    \reversemarginpar
    
    \newcommand{\arnote}[1]{%
        \marginnote{%
            \sloppy
            \upshape
            \footnotesize
            \RL{\foreignlanguage{arabic}{#1}}%
        }%
    }
    
    \newcommand*{\arnotesx}[1]{%
        \refstepcounter{enumi}\theenumi.%
        \arnote{#1}%
    }
    
    \begin{document}
        
        \begin{subexamples}[preamble={\arnote{كرة القدم}\vspace*{-1.6\baselineskip}}]
            
            \item%[\arnote{كرة القدم}]
            \digloss
            {kurat al-qadam}
            {ball \textsc{def}-foot}
            {football}
            
            \item[\arnotesx{كرة القدم}]
            \digloss
            {kurat al-qadam}
            {ball \textsc{def}-foot}
            {football}
            
            \item[\arnotesx{كرة القدم}]
            \digloss
            {kurat al-qadam}
            {ball \textsc{def}-foot}
            {football}
            
            \item[\arnotesx{كرة القدم}]
            \digloss
            {kurat al-qadam}
            {ball \textsc{def}-foot}
            {football}
            
            \item[\arnotesx{كرة القدم}]
            \digloss
            {kurat al-qadam}
            {ball \textsc{def}-foot}
            {football}
            
        \end{subexamples}
        
    \end{document}