Manual of Corpus Viewer
This software was developed for the purpose of viewing and editing philological corpora.
At the moment, the emphasis is on Ancient Egyptian texts.
Buttons in the top menu
Not all buttons will be enabled all of the time.
In particular, some buttons are disabled for applets.
Open
Opens a corpus. A corpus is represented by an index
file, of which the name ends in .xml.
One may select an existing such index, or create a new one.
Close
Closes the corpus.
Move
Moves the corpus, that is, the index file.
Other files remain in place. References from the
index file to other files are appropriately updated.
Text
A new text is created in the corpus. Again, the name of a
text must end in .xml. One may create a new file here.
Alternatively, the text may be an existing file,
but not one that is already included in the corpus.
Refresh
The index of the corpus is computed anew. This can be convenient
when texts are changed by manipulating files directly, rather than
through the graphical user-interface.
Pdf
Exports the entire corpus as HTML file with links to PDF files,
in a directory to be selected.
Because export to PDF is slow, this operation can take some time
for large corpora.
Help
Opens this window.
Indexes
There can be one or more indexes listing the texts in the corpus.
The indexes are created automatically, as texts are added.
The main index lists names of texts. Other indexes may list books
or historical persons on the first level. A left mouse click on a text
(blue line) opens that text with its textual resources.
A right mouse click opens an editor for the indexing information of the text.
(A right mouse click can also be obtained by a normal (left) mouse click while
holding down the Ctrl key. This is especially useful on Mac OS X.)
A black line in an index represents a collection of one or more texts.
Clicking on a black line expands it into the next level,
where we may find texts, or further subcollections.
Corpus name
By selecting the "corpus" tab, one may change the name of a corpus.
Keyboard shortcuts
Instead of clicking on e.g. Open one may also type
Alt+O.
Watch the underlined capital letters on the buttons.
On Mac OS X, the Command key must be used instead of the
Alt key for menu items.
(The Command key is the one with the apple and the four-leaf clover
on it.)
For buttons, including the buttons
for opening menus in the menu bar,
Alt (not Command) is used irrespective of platform.
In text fields,
ligatures and special characters such as 'ß' and 'Ö'
can be entered by typing two characters followed by
Alt+Z. The conversion table can be made to appear through
Alt+X. On Mac OS X,
use Command+Z and Command+X instead.
Directory structure
A recommended directory structure for a corpus has a directory
containing the index file, named for example corpus.xml,
with the following subdirectories:
- texts: contains the texts, that is, the indexing information,
and references to textual resources available for texts
- resources: contains the textual resources themselves
- align: contains alignments between textual resources
- pdf: contains derived PDF files
Disclaimer
This is experimental software and comes without any warranty.
Users are advised to make frequent backups of the data that they create and
modify using this tool.
If for any reason execution of the tool is stopped in an uncontrolled manner,
for example due to a crash of the operating system or failure of hardware,
it is advisable to do a visual inspection of the files and directories
that make up the relevant corpus.
This is because the tool copies files before overwriting them with modified data,
and these copies may hold material that would otherwise be lost.