Manual of AELalignViewer 0.3.2
This software was developed to view interpretations of Ancient Egyptian
texts. The different resources are aligned beneath each other.
You can scroll up and down, by manipulating the scroll bar, as usual.
By making the window narrower or wider, the formatting is changed to fit as much
text horizontally as possible. This reformatting may take some time,
so exercise a little patience after you have changed the window size.
Buttons in upper panel of main window
Quit
Quits the program.
Index
Presents an overview of the resources available for a text.
You can choose to unselect certain 'streams', which are then
removed from the formatted text after you click on
Okay or Apply;
the former also closes the subwindow.
Click on Quit to close the subwindow without changing anything.
Settings
Changes various quantities that influence the output.
These take effect after clicking on Okay or Apply;
the former also closes the subwindow.
As remarked before, reformatting may take some time.
By clicking on Default, the default settings appear in the subwindow.
Click on Quit to close the subwindow without changing anything.
Most settings are self-explanatory. One exception is
Uniform line height. This is particularly useful if only one
stream is included in the output.
By ticking this option, as much space above any line is added
as would be added above lines that include markers of points.
The effect is that each line is roughly at the same
vertical distance from the one preceding it.
By ticking the option for Lexical entries abbreviated to textal,
one may view a sequence of lexical entries as if it were a running
transliteration. If hyperlinks have been added to the lexical
entries, the words of transliteration become buttons that can be clicked.
Find
Finds an occurrence of a coordinate tag. Type the position,
and click on Go to let the text scroll to where the tag occurs. If a text
is associated with several versions, you also need to select
a version.
Click on Clear to clear the position.
Click on Quit to close the subwindow.
The subwindow is also closed
upon finding the required coordinate tag. If the tag is not found,
this is reported in the subwindow.
Export
Unless AELalignViewer is run as applet, the formatted text can also be
saved as PDF file. A large collection of parameters can be customized.
The resolution of the hieroglyphic font affects the accuracy
of positioning of glyphs and the quality of shading.
Regardless of the resolution, the glyphs themselves are
rendered without pixelization.
Help
Open this subwindow.
Buttons in the text
If several resources are being viewed,
there is a button at the beginning
of each line, which represents the resource from which that line stems.
The button is labelled by the first few letters of the name
of the author. By clicking on such a button, a window opens
with more information on the resource. Such a subwindow can be
closed by clicking on Quit.
If only one resource is being viewed, such buttons
are not shown in the text however. Instead,
the additional information can be obtained by clicking on the
buttons in the index (see above).
For lexical entries associated with hyperlinks, other buttons appear.
The default behaviour of clicking on such
buttons is that a browser is directed to a URL; this only work however
if the software is run as applet.
The same holds for hyperlinks in footnotes.
Without mouse
You may mostly avoid using mouse clicks to manipulate
the viewer. E.g.
instead of clicking on Quit, one may also hit
Alt+Q or Ctrl+Q, depending on the platform.
Something similar holds for Index and I,
for Settings and S, etc.
Watch the underlined letters on the buttons.
Further information
Documentation of the underlying data format AELalign.0.3
can be found at:
http://www.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~mjn/egyptian/align