ELAN Changelog

What's new in ELAN 5.2.0

Aug 22, 2018

THE MAIN NEW FEATURES IN INTERLINEARIZATION MODE ARE:
the Whitespace Analyzer now has a configuration panel that allows to specify how to handle punctuation and other special characters
the Configure button of the editor is now active; it creates a window in which colors and margins can be set
a small Play Selection panel has been added in the top-left corner of the editor view. It plays the segment corresponding to the currently selected row in the list, taking the audio of the first linked media file.
the right mouse button context menu of the editor panel is now also available if there are no annotations visible in the editor area (so that tiers can be made visible again after a Hide All)
little markers in front of tier names now indicate wrapped lines
the Suggestions (or disambiguation) window now has an option to remember and reuse the location and size of the window
in the Lexicon Properties window it is now possible to specify a preferred sort order for the lexicon
when editing a lexical entry, clicking the text field of a “placeholder” entry field has the same effect as clicking the Add (+) button
FIXES:
some functions, e.g. Import Tiers, didn’t work if there were spaces, diacritics or even Chinese characters in the file path
in Import Tiers and Import CV's external CV’s are now imported as well. Preferred colors and fonts are now copied from preference files.
in specific situations ELAN could crash during launch when reading the file in which the user defined shortcuts are stored
the Undo of Shift All Annotations Left or Right of the Crosshair would sometimes fail to undo the shift of some of the annotations
the WebMAUS extension didn’t send the selected language to the server in the correct way
in Interlinearization Mode:
the column name in the table header of the lexicon view sometimes didn’t correspond to the contents of that column
clicking a row in the editor would sometimes cause it to jump to an other segment than the one clicked

New in ELAN 5.1.0 (Jan 26, 2018)

New in ELAN 5.0.0 Beta (Apr 18, 2017)

CHANGES AND NEW FEATURES:
in Transcription Mode find and replace has been activated too, some improvements in the color coding of cells (editable/non-editable, auto create or not)
in Transcription Mode merging of annotations and undo of some actions were handled incorrectly (visualization out of sync)
the Signal Viewer can now can display wave files that are bigger than 2Gb (up to 4Gb)
in Merge Transcriptions the “Overwrite” option now also applies to annotations on Symbolic Association and -Subdivision tiers
new additions provided by the Sign Language Linguistics group of the Radboud University:
an extension for setting up a connection to a Signbank lexicon
“inline” visualization of a short video connected to a lexical entry or an external controlled vocabulary entry (requires a specific syntax)
alphabetical sorting of tiers via buttons or table headers in several windows and viewers
easier access to the “Work with tier sets” flag, a “View by Tier Sets” option in the Density viewer
experimental support for spell checking based on Hunspell or a Gecco web service
batch wise updating of transcriptions after changes in external controlled vocabularies
in the Interlinearization Mode and its lexicon component:
in the lexicon properties’ window custom fields can be added to a lexicon, these fields will then be available in the “Edit Entry” window and in the visible columns context menu of the lexicon table
improved keyboard navigation between annotations, also between tiers
keyboard shortcuts for the actions available for the active annotation
added margins between text of an annotation and its ‘bounding box’ and around the tier names etc. Display of the bounding boxes will become optional in a next release
in the suggestion window tool tips have been added to each suggestion showing some information from the lexical entry
single file find and replace has been enabled in this mode
MAIN FIXES:
the “Show/Hide More Tiers” window had some dependencies on the selected interface language, these are now removed
fixed writing of eaf files containing multiple locales (input methods) with the same language but different variants
when creating a copy of a tier with a different linguistic type, references from annotations to CV entries are now removed
the “Multiple File Edit” window would show an error when loading newer files, this is now fixed
after resorting the lexical entries in the table in Interlinearization mode, editing an entry would select the wrong entry
the drop down list of the inline edit box would fail in case of CV entries without a description
the .mp4 player on Windows 7 (and some Windows 10 systems) should work again after recompilation of a native library
in “elan.properties” a new property has been added (“JMMFPlayer.EndOfMedia.NumberOfFramesBuffer”, default = 5) for setting the number of frames that is used as a “buffer” at the end of the file. The buffer is used to prevent a jump to begin of media when reaching the end.

New in ELAN 4.9.1 (Jul 16, 2015)

New in ELAN 4.9.0 (Jun 25, 2015)

THE MAIN NEW FEATURES ARE:
calculation of inter-rater reliability based on codings (annotations) in multiple files. Two existing algorithms have been implemented and/or included.
The old Tier->Compare Annotators function moved to this new “wizard” style compare dialog.
interaction with the CLARIN-D WebLicht framework. Web services that expose Natural Language Processing type of tools within the WebLicht framework, can now be called from within ELAN. Possible tasks to perform are tokenization, part-of-speech tagging and lemmatization (mostly for well-described languages).
export of annotations from multiple files to the Theme data format (preliminary implementation, not yet documented)
in the Editing pane of the Preferences a new variant has been added to the Copy Annotation function (copies: the annotation, media file name, tier name, start time, end time to the clipboard)
in export as QuickTime Text an option has been added to apply the last used font and display settings
two new preference settings concerning controlled vocabulary entries have been added:
an option to specify the width of the dropdown box for controlled vocabulary entries (in the Timeline Viewer)
a flag to specify that the description of cv entries should be shown in the dropdown box as well
changes in the Audio and Video Recognizer tab:
the Audio and Video Recognizer tabs have been merged into one Recognizers tab
the window showing the logging messages of the recognizer can now be opened immediately after starting the process, so that messages can be viewed “live” while they are generated
in the dropdown list of recognizers, the primary type of data (audio, video, timeseries/other) for each recognizer is now indicated by an icon
in the same list an icon can be displayed of the logo of the producer of the recognizer
THE MAIN BUG FIXES AND OTHER CHANGES ARE:
a problem with access to ISOcat (two-letter) language codes has been fixed by including them in the ELAN distribution
a small fix has been added for the language dependent display of CMDI metadata that link to the CLARIN Concept Registry rather than to ISOcat
it was not possible to change the offset of a timeseries data file in the linked files dialog; that is now working again
in Synchronization mode the “player” for timeseries data files did not use and display the correct media duration
in the annotation statistics tables, numbers in columns that can contain decimals, now always contain a decimal marker
there was a rounding effect in the calculation of annotation times in the Tokenize tier function (only if the destination was a top level tier or an Included In type of tier)
the Grid Viewer wouldn’t always correctly store and restore the selected tier and selected mode
a potential memory leak in the native media player on Mac OS (Cocoa QT Player) has been fixed
the frame forward/backward functions of the Java Direct Show player could cause a jump to the begin or end of media in case of an audio file as the master media (and depending on preference settings)

New in ELAN 4.8.1 (Dec 30, 2014)

New in ELAN 4.8.0 (Dec 5, 2014)

THE MAIN NEW FEATURES ARE:
a commentary framework that allows to add comments and share them with colleagues
the list of languages relevant for the content of annotations (introduced in 4.7) can now be edited separately and globally via the Edit menu
a Content Language can now be specified for each tier. This attribute can be used to indicate the language used / annotated on that tier. The existing “Default language” attribute has been renamed to “Input Method”. This new attribute can be used for sorting and grouping of tiers in several places.
the Annotation Statistics windows for single file or multiple files now have an additional tab for Content Language
the Metadata viewer can now display CMDI metadata as well. The display of the CMDI metadata is content language sensitive, meaning that metadata elements can be shown in different languages if translations are available in ISOcat.
the ISOcat DCR reference of an annotation as shown in the tooltip is now language sensitive a well
linked metadata files are now managed via the Secondary Linked Files tab of the Linked Files window. The link is therefore now stored in the .eaf instead of in the .pfsx preferences file.
the Tokenize tier function has been improved in two ways: it is now possible to specify a list of punctuation marks which will be treated as separate tokens AND the destination tier no longer has to be a dependent tier of the source tier, it can now be any independent tier
when importing .csv it is now possible to specify that no annotations should be created for empty cells. As a side effect this allows to import .csv with multiple tiers without enforcing the same segmentation on all tiers.
the preview in the import .csv window now updates when selecting a different delimiter
two new Preference settings have been added to the Media tab: automatically start play back (of the selection) when an annotation is activated AND start the player when marking the start time of a new annotation with Shift+Enter
THE MAIN BUG FIXES AND CHANGES ARE:
the OK and Delete button in the multiple file selection window remained disabled in specific cases with only folders selected
in the Delete tier(s) window it is possible to select multiple tiers in the table. Selecting a tier in the dropdown box now selects only that tier instead of adding it the selected tiers.
the tier-related items have been removed from the right-mouse context menu of the Timeline Viewer. The annotation related items are now hidden when there is no active annotation.
in the annotation statistics tables a decimal delimiter and at least one decimal are shown in columns containing decimal values
Annotations from Subtraction wasn’t always working well, it is functional again

New in ELAN 4.8.0 Beta (Nov 11, 2014)

Contains a number of new features and some bug fixes. Most of the new functions have been developed as part of two CLARIN-NL projects (ColTime and EXILSEA).
The main new features are:
a commentary framework that allows to add comments and share them with colleagues
the main user interface for this is a Comment Viewer in the upper right corner tab pane
comments link to a time segment of the media and optionally to a tier, the time ruler of the Timeline viewer indicates segments with a comment by means of colored bars.
the contents of a comment is plain text, a comment has various other attributes
the list of comments can be filtered, sorted and configured in several ways
the comments can be stored and shared in different ways:
comments are stored locally and optionally on a web server
a comment file is an XML file (.eafcomment), each comment file refers to one transcription file
sharing of comments can be organised in the following ways:
via file sharing tools that use a shared folder on the local file system
via email, the recipient can import the comment via the clipboard
via the web service that allows users with an account to share and synchronize comments
a search function allows to search in multiple comment files. An .eaf file with comment can be opened by double clicking a comment in the result list.
the list of languages relevant for the content of annotations (introduced in 4.7) can now be edited separately and globally via the Edit menu
a Content Language can now be specified for each tier. This attribute can be used to indicate the language used / annotated on that tier. The existing “Default language” attribute has been renamed to “Input Method”. This new attribute can be used for sorting and grouping of tiers in several places.
the Metadata viewer can now display CMDI metadata as well. The display of the CMDI metadata is content language sensitive, meaning that metadata elements can be shown in different languages if translations are available in ISOcat.
the ISOcat DCR reference of an annotation as shown in the tooltip is now language sensitive a well
linked metadata files are now managed via the Secondary Linked Files tab of the Linked Files window. The link is therefore now stored in the .eaf instead of in the .pfsx preferences file.
the Tokenize tier function has been improved in two ways:
it is now possible to specify a list of punctuation marks which will be treated as separate tokens
the destination tier no longer has to be a dependent tier of the source tier, it can now be any independent tier
when importing .csv it is now possible to specify that no annotations should be created for empty cells. As a side effect this allows to import .csv with multiple tiers without enforcing the same segmentation on all tiers.
the preview in the import .csv window now updates when selecting a different delimiter
The main bug fixes and changes are:
the OK and Delete button in the multiple file selection window remained disabled in specific cases with only folders selected
in the Delete tier(s) window it is possible to select multiple tiers in the table. Selecting a tier in the dropdown box now selects only that tier instead of adding it the selected tiers.

New in ELAN 4.7.3 (Sep 9, 2014)

New in ELAN 4.7.2 (Jul 7, 2014)

New in ELAN 4.7.1 (Jul 7, 2014)

New in ELAN 4.7.0 (Jun 9, 2014)

NEW FEATURES:
it is now possible to specify a number of languages that are relevant for the content of annotations. The languages can be selected from a list of ISO 639-3 languages and added to a local cache. First use of these languages is in multilingual CV’s, other multilingual content will follow (display of Data Categories, Metadata). The preferred language can be set in the Preferences window. A language property will later be added to tiers and annotations (already added to the EAF schema).
This is unrelated to the language that can be selected for the user interface of ELAN. It is also different from the current tier attribute “Default Language”, which is in fact used for input methods.
the user interface of the ISOcat Data Category selection windows has been brushed up and can display information on the categories in all available languages now
in the Edit Multiple Files window it is now also possible to add dependent tiers
merging of tiers can now be performed on multiple files
the silence (or noise) level for the Silence Recognizer (in the Audio Recognizer panel) can now be specified as a value, with a slider, in addition to the existing example based approach
in the control panel with the volume and rate sliders, new volume controls have been added for all media sources with audio. These controls allow to quickly switch between audio tracks or to mix audio sources (this concerns the audibility). By default the audio of the first media file (the master media) is still leading. There is an option in the Preferences to hide the extra controls.
in the SignalViewer a dropdown menu now allows to switch between linked wave files (this concerns the visualization)
in Segmentation mode a new way of segmenting has been implemented: pressing the segmentation key marks the begin, releasing the key marks the end time of a segment.
(Contributed by Bob Kuczewski)
multiple file N-gram analysis produces statistics on all N-grams found in selected tiers. The size of the N-gram can be set and the results can be saved as tab-delimitd text. The raw data containing the results of many applied algorithms can be exported as well. (Contributed by Larwan Berke and Rosalee Wolfe)
FASTSearch is a variant of the simple multiple file search, but should in general be faster. (Contributed by Larwan Berke and Rosalee Wolfe)
interaction with Praat should now work without installation of sendpraat. Included in the distribution on all platforms is now a small library that builds on the sendpraat sources and that sends the commands to Praat.
the distribution now includes small extensions that can call web services performing automatic recognition tasks on audio or video files
multilingual controlled vocabularies:
each entry in a vocabulary can have multiple values, one per language
annotations based on a CV entry will display one of these values, depending on the language selected by the user
annotations maintain a reference to the id of an entry, CV entries that are part of the EAF now have an id, just as external CV entries
BUG FIXES AND CHANGES:
the frame forward/backward function has been revised in order to make it more accurate. This especially applies to NTSC type of videos, videos with a frame duration that is not a whole number. The QuickTime based player now uses built-in next/previous frame functions.
There is an option to stick to the old implementation in the Preferences Panel, for ongoing projects.
for the media player based on Microsoft Media Foundation on Windows a synchronous interaction mode has been added. It can be switched on in the Preferences window.
It is an alternative to the default asynchronous mode and can be tried in case of instable start/pause response and general behaviour.
in export to subtitle text some changes have been made in the handling of, especially small, overlaps
the CHAT importer has been improved slightly; it now supports the @Media header, media times without %snd or %mov or without file_name
if a font is set for a tier it is now also used in the list of controlled vocabulary entries
the size and location of the ELAN windows is now stored more frequently to prevent annoying jumps when changing preferences via the Preferences window.
some problems with storing the last used media location and format have been fixed
short MPEG videos would sometimes freeze ELAN
setting the shortcut for Import Toolbox actually changed the shortcut for the multiple file variant of Import Toolbox
some small fixes in the export to Toolbox; the setting for the record marker is not always stored and appending the filename to the record marker now cuts off the extension at the last dot in the name
after running a recognizer the results were not always automatically loaded and the media descriptor for segmentations was not always set. This is now fixed.
when going from Annotation Mode to Transcription Mode the selected annotation is now maintained
some errors in producing the XML of the export tiers for recognizer have been repaired
in Transcription Mode when there are no tiers in the table it was impossible to get to the Show/Hide Tiers menu
subscribing to the mailing list from ELAN didn’t work correctly, it should now
sometimes an eaf would be loaded twice, leading to doubling of all annotations, this shouldn’t occur anymore

New in ELAN 4.6.2 (Nov 14, 2013)

The new features are:
an option to export one or more controlled vocabularies as an external controlled vocabulary file (.ecv)
an option to create tiers based on the annotation values of an input tier
in the Lexicon view a button has been added to also apply values to depending annotations of the active annotation, provided there are mappings between the depending tiers and lexical entries
in the Linked Files dialog it is now possible to edit the “Offset” column in the table, allowing to enter the offset per media file. In this window you can now either change (the order of) the set of media files or you can change the offsets by typing.
in the Remove Annotations… function there is now an option to remove all empty annotations
in addition to the page forward/backward buttons, it is now possible to jump to a specific hit in the search results panel of the structured multiple file search
there is now row highlighting in the structured multiple file search results panel
The main bug fixes and changes are:
FLEx export:
in steps 1 and 2 more (linguistic) types are now allowed for the phrase and lower levels so that the export process is less likely to get stuck
the export failed in step 2 in case there are no “item” tiers on the phrase level
now all media files are exported to the flextext file
in step 4 the language and item type attributes that were added would not always appear in the drop down lists
FLEx import:
in some cases multiple identical paragraph-annotations were created “on top” of each other
there were several problems with the handling of time information in flextext:
overlapping annotations on different tiers would no longer overlap (begin time of annotations were shifted)
when there was a mix of aligned and unaligned annotations the calculation of the duration of the unaligned annotations was not done on a per tier basis
all time information was lost with the “extract speaker from note field” option selected
multiple file import failed with an exception in the first step
Annotations from Overlaps with Constraints did not work, always zero annotations were created
Annotations from Gaps involving multiple tiers produced incorrect results
the Copy Tier function would sometimes fail after creating a new linguistic type
setting a font or highlight color for a tier didn’t work anymore (only in Transcription mode it was still functional)
the colors and shortcuts of controlled vocabulary entries were lost when a CV was imported
the colors of controlled vocabulary entries were lost when two eaf files were merged.
the link to a timeseries file wasn’t updated in the configuration file when it was updated in the eaf; track definitions were lost
the setting for the folder to store Activity Monitor logs wasn’t (re)stored
the preference for last used media folder wasn’t always stored
when creating multiple eaf files for media files based on a template, the preferences of the template were lost
it was possible to open multiple windows for the structured multiple file search, but queries in different windows could interfere. Now there can only be one search window at a time per ELAN instantiation.
jumping to an annotation from the multiple file search results failed if the eaf wasn’t open yet
changing the participant in the Multiple File Editor was dysfunctional
ELAN crashed when deleting the first annotation (the first row) in Transcription mode
save current frame as image would pop up a “overwrite” question message twice
the export as Filmstrip failed when it included a waveform and the background color for the last video frame was incorrect
the time selection in the Signal Viewer would be displayed in the wrong “location” if a time offset was specified for the wav file
after an Undo in Transcription mode the table wasn’t repainted (so that it seemed the undo didn’t work)
templates saved from within Transcription mode could freeze ELAN when used for a new annotation file
when importing .cha CHAT files invalid XML characters are now filtered out of annotation content
the implementation of the “Lookup” type of input methods (ipa-trt, chinese) has been updated. The numeric keyboard can be used to select a character as well. On Mac OS the input methods no longer have to be copied into the Java/Extensions folder.

New in ELAN 4.6.1 (Oct 17, 2013)

New in ELAN 4.1.2 (Sep 15, 2011)

The main fixes are:
with the "snap annotations" option selected, creating an annotation or modifying an existing one would sometimes position the annotation at the wrong (time) location. Existing annotations would be changed without the possibility to undo.
on Mac OS X exiting the application by using Command+Q or by using the Quit option in the ELAN 4.1.x menu would correctly show a message in case of changed transcription. But when clicking the Cancel button in this "save changes" window, the application would quit anyway without saving the changes. This is now fixed.
on Mac OS X all mnemonics (open a menu with an alt+letter combination) are now disabled. Until now only some were disabled.
fixes in Transcription mode:
the table would sometimes jump to unpredictable positions when clicking a cell where there is no annotation yet
with a tier linked to a controlled vocabulary, activating a cell would always select the first entry, even after hitting the escape key or the enter key with no entry selected.
wrapping of text in a cell and updating the row height accordingly has been improved
after zooming in the waveform was not always positioned correctly relative to the time ruler. This became especially noticeable with the introduction of the more fine grained zooming levels.
in export statistics for multiple files, files in sub-directories were not included. A bug in the calculation of the median value in the participant tab has been fixed as well.
in export as Toolbox file the correct alignment of words sometimes appeared to be lost when opening the file in Toolbox. A correction is now made specifically for multibyte characters.
importing a CSV file would fail in some cases if there is no header line (with tier names). This is now fixed.
in single file statistics empty annotations were not present in the statistics, fixed.
colors and keystrokes for Controlled Vocabulary entries in templates were not correctly applied to transcriptions based on the template
the alignment in interlinear text export was sometimes incorrect in case of non-spacing modifying characters in the "tokens"
The main new features are:
in Transcription mode it is now possible to hide a group of tiers. This option is available in the settings window as well as via the right mouse button popup menu of the table. Via the popup menu one can now also make a single tier non-editable.
an option has been added to create empty depending annotations for the active annotation
in the tooltip of annotations based on a CV entry the description of that entry is now also visible
in the export to HTML it is now possible to include an audio or video tag with a hyperlink per block of text that allows to play the corresponding segment. This function requires a browser supporting HTML 5.
in the interlinear text export an option has been added to use tabs instead of whitespaces to separate words/tokens
the order of the tiers in the timeline viewer is now also the default order in export options. For all export windows the custom tier order is now stored as a preference.
the option to Show/Hide more tiers in the tier label part of the timeline view has now been moved to the top level of the popup menu
a preliminary implementation of an Activity Monitor has been added
Simplified Chinese has been added as a language for the user interface