ELAN Changelog

What's new in ELAN 6.7.0

Nov 6, 2023
  • This mainly concerns some (fairly specific) text edit actions in both Transcription and Annotation Mode and in switching between these modes. Related to this, the inline edit box in the Timeline viewer now, by default, remains within the boundaries of the view area. Even if the annotation itself is wider than the view area, the edit box is limited to the width of the view and remains in the view area when scrolling. A menu item in the right mouse context menu allows to switch back to the old behaviour.
  • The main other changes are:
  • a new option in the Media preferences panel allows to specify that a detached video window should not always remain on top, but instead is allowed to disappear behind other windows
  • a new option has been added to the export to subtitle text, allowing to export a separate subtitles file for each selected tier
  • the find & replace window should now close when the corresponding transcription window is closed
  • clicking a hit in the multiple file search result table should now jump to the correct annotation
  • the Filter Tier dialog now stores and restores filters as a preference

New in ELAN 6.6.0 (Aug 17, 2023)

  • The main changes are:
  • a new function to modify the start and/or end time of all annotations on selected tiers. For both the left and the right boundary a number of milliseconds can be set. Can be applied to a single document, the current document, or to multiple files.
  • two new options in the FLEx import; it is now possible to use the speaker ID as tier prefix and to specify the preferred item type for the phrase level top tier
  • a preliminary dark theme or dark mode is now available, based on the cross-platform Java Look and Feel. Some hard-coded colours were removed here and there, then fore- and background colours are more or less 'flipped', resulting in a non-optimal (e.g. icons are not always adapted) dark mode. The Look and Feel can be set in the Platform/OS preferences panel.
  • the Whisper recognizer now also supports the experimental word-boundary timestamps as exported in the .srt output file
  • The fixes and minor changes are:
  • regular expression search with the b word boundary matcher didn't work for all Unicode characters in the previous release, this should now work again
  • working in Transcription Mode could cause ELAN to crash, especially when using diacritics. This has been repaired now.
  • ELAN would sometimes freeze when scrolling horizontally in the Timeline viewer while the media is playing, especially when scrolling with a trackpad. This shouldn't happen anymore.
  • in Segmentation Mode the keyboard shortcuts of controlled vocabulary entries now also work in the press-hold-release workflow
  • fixed a problem with manual tier selection and user interface updates in the Fleiss' kappa compare annotators workflow
  • loading a file in Interlinearization mode sometimes didn't work due to an invalid stored preference, this has been repaired

New in ELAN 6.5.0 (May 13, 2023)

  • The fixes and minor changes are:
  • The rows in the table of the Transcription mode sometimes didn't scale properly, rendering part of the text unreadable. This is now improved, the height is now based on the actual word wrapping.
  • Fixed incorrect sizing of the Edit Tier Set window
  • Fixed scaling of the video in the 'inline' video player
  • Improved the initial video scaling on macOS
  • The preference slider for the UI font size now also allows to decrease the font size
  • Audio sample extraction from .mp3 files with FFmpeg could freeze ELAN, this is now fixed
  • Fixed a hard crash when changing linked media files on macOS
  • The media offset is now correctly applied to the Spectrogram viewer
  • A faster preview of the WebAnnotation export, only a few annotations per tier are shown
  • Fixed loading of a timeseries configuration file if it is not in the same folder as the eaf file
  • Removed several extensions (LEXUS, AAMLR)
  • Added several non-standard or experimental options to the elan.properties file:
  • An option to not use the native (low-level) stop time for the DirectShow player; in combination with some formats (e.g. .mp3) the native stop time can cause jumps at the end of playing a selection
  • An option to (not) use a byte array for loading audio samples from video files (instead of a byte buffer); byte array is now the default, in an attempt to prevent memory related crashes
  • An option to use a Canvas object instead of a Panel as host object for video on Windows
  • An option to disable namespace aware XML parsing; this is sometimes needed for loading older eaf files

New in ELAN 6.4.0 (Jul 4, 2022)

  • The main changes are:
  • support for calling a pre-configured WebLicht tool chain using a stored tool chain file
  • a new export to an Annotation Server has been added. Annotations are uploaded in W3C Web Annotation format (experimental).
  • the support for external references from annotations and CV entries has been extended:
  • a menu item in the Annotation menu allows to set a reference to an external resource
  • right clicking the active annotation shows a Show in Browser or Open in default application menu item if there is such a reference
  • when the external resource is a video, hovering the mouse pointer over the annotation with the CTRL key pressed, the video is shown inline in the (Timeline) viewer.
  • on Linux and macOS audio samples can now be extracted from video using embedded FFmpeg libraries
  • in the Platform/OS preference panel, a separate group has now been created for audio extraction from video. The option None disables this feature, the other option(s) depend on the platform.
  • in the export to FLEx, three-letter language codes for languages that have a two-letter equivalent, are replaced by the two-letter code
  • added support for float type of .wav files
  • The fixes and minor changes are:
  • the custom scrollbars in the Timeline viewer have been replaced by a standard scroll pane. Especially vertical scrolling should be smoother (this still depends on the system). The zoom slider in the right bottom corner had to be removed for this.
  • fixed manual setting of a custom frame rate (especially on macOS)
  • extended the options for a custom video aspect ratio, added options for vertical, portrait videos
  • removed superfluous tab characters in the tab delimited text export
  • cleaned up or removed several features based on web services
  • fixed a bug in Transcription mode occurring in less common tier type set-ups

New in ELAN 6.3.0 (Feb 3, 2022)

  • Changed:
  • a new Annotation from manually entered begin and end time window allows to create one or more annotation(s), on one or more tiers, based on times that can be entered manually. A value for the annotation(s) can be entered too.
  • added the first version of a Spectrogram viewer which shows a spectrum of frequencies of an audio file or track. It is a separate viewer, so it can be shown alongside the waveform viewer or instead of it or not at all. Currently only available in Annotation mode.
  • the Save As dialog now suggests a file name the first time a new annotation file is saved
  • Brazilian Portuguese has been added as a user interface language (Thanks!)
  • In the (simple) multiple file search, the Before and After annotations are now exported as well:
  • in the Platform/OS preference panel checkboxes have been added that allow
  • to enable/disable a media framework's function to extract the audio from a video file for waveform visualization
  • to enable/disable the use of the player's lowest level 'pause at the end of the selection' feature (macOS only)
  • The fixes and minor changes are:
  • the zoom level of the waveform viewer should no longer inherit the last zoomlevel the viewer had in Transcription mode (e.g. after switching to Annotation mode)
  • an error in the structured multiple file search when searching with the No annotation constraint, is now resolved
  • the AVF media player on macOS sometimes wouldn't stop at the end of the selection, this is now improved
  • most file chooser windows can now be closed with the Escape key or Ctrl+W key combination
  • the background color of the detached video window is changed to black
  • fixed .wav support for 8-bit stereo and added support for 32-bit .wav files and 32-bit audio from video

New in ELAN 6.2.0 (Jul 6, 2021)

  • The main changes are:
  • An Import WebAnnotation JSON File function was added, the export function has been updated
  • More extensive error reporting from the native part of the media players, a checkbox for some player frameworks to enable debug mode (to be used for troubleshooting only, there is a performance cost)
  • The Annotation Density Plot now applies the colors defined in a controlled vocabulary for annotations based on a CV entry
  • The Add New Participant function now also copies fonts and colors of the copied tiers
  • In the Edit List of Languages window it is now possible to use two letter codes for a custom language (ISO 639-1 codes are not yet provided as a list to select from)
  • In Export List of Words there are now options to include total word count, unique word count and frequency in terms of percentage
  • The fixes and minor changes are:
  • In Structured search multiple eaf single quotation marks or apostrophes (')(and some other characters) in a query are now properly escaped and can be searched for
  • In the JMMFMediaPlayer (Windows) using mp4 files with more than two tracks or streams (e.g. from a GoPro) should no longer cause a hard crash
  • On Windows opening a selection in Praat didn't work anymore, this is fixed now
  • In Export as FLEx File font names containing a - in their name, should now export correctly to the languages section
  • Display performance improvement in the Timeline viewer in case of a large amount of annotations (especially of the symbolic subdivision type)
  • Play selection with VLC player on Linux sometimes wouldn't stop at the end of the selection, this is now improved

New in ELAN 6.2.0 (Jul 6, 2021)

  • The main changes are:
  • An Import WebAnnotation JSON File function was added, the export function has been updated
  • More extensive error reporting from the native part of the media players, a checkbox for some player frameworks to enable debug mode (to be used for troubleshooting only, there is a performance cost)
  • The Annotation Density Plot now applies the colors defined in a controlled vocabulary for annotations based on a CV entry
  • The Add New Participant function now also copies fonts and colors of the copied tiers
  • In the Edit List of Languages window it is now possible to use two letter codes for a custom language (ISO 639-1 codes are not yet provided as a list to select from)
  • In Export List of Words there are now options to include total word count, unique word count and frequency in terms of percentage
  • The fixes and minor changes are:
  • In Structured search multiple eaf single quotation marks or apostrophes (')(and some other characters) in a query are now properly escaped and can be searched for
  • In the JMMFMediaPlayer (Windows) using mp4 files with more than two tracks or streams (e.g. from a GoPro) should no longer cause a hard crash
  • On Windows opening a selection in Praat didn't work anymore, this is fixed now
  • In Export as FLEx File font names containing a - in their name, should now export correctly to the languages section
  • Display performance improvement in the Timeline viewer in case of a large amount of annotations (especially of the symbolic subdivision type)
  • Play selection with VLC player on Linux sometimes wouldn't stop at the end of the selection, this is now improved

New in ELAN 6.0.0 (Dec 2, 2020)

  • The main new functions are:
  • An export to Time-aligned Interlinear Text, which produces textual output where the positioning is based on time (contributed by Steffen Zimmermann)
  • An export to WebAnnotation JSON format, a W3C recommendation for annotations (preliminary)
  • Calculation of interrater reliability for more than two raters based on Fleiss' kappa
  • An option to open a remote, online .eaf file
  • An option to filter lexical entries in the table of the Lexicon Editor
  • New Preference settings:
  • Set an application wide default font (and font size) for tiers, annotations and CV entries
  • Specify a folder to search for missing linked files (other than audio and video files)
  • Almost all keyboard shortcut combinations of Alt+LetterKey (including Alt+N) have been replaced by other combinations
  • The fixes and minor changes are:
  • In single file search use of regular expressions on tiers with a CV is possible again
  • Fixed disappearance of regex and case sensitive checkboxes in single file search and next and previous buttons in multiple file search
  • Fixed a problem in structured multiple file search in case of an "empty" domain (0 files)
  • Added a property to "elan.properties" to specify an alternative location for LexiconComponent lexicon XML files
  • The inaccurate rounding of time values in the Toolbox parser has been solved
  • Fixed a problem with file paths in the multiple file Toolbox export
  • The CV edit dialog and the CV suggest panel now also use the default tier font for their fields
  • On macOS (with JAVF player) frame forward and backward now also work for audio files
  • On macOS some of the menus remained disabled immediately after opening a file, this has been fixed
  • A problem with play selection in combinaton with selection mode has been fixed (or at least improved)

New in ELAN 5.9.0 (Mar 22, 2020)

  • The main new functions are:
  • An Annotation Density Plot window, graphically showing the distribution of annotations on selected tiers. With an option to save to a png image file.
  • A Document Information window, presenting a summary of properties and contents of the current annotation document
  • A Document Properties window allows to specify the author of the document and include license information
  • It is now possible to annotate remote media files that are accessible via other protocols than rtsp, e.g. http(s). The Add Streaming File button is changed to Add Remote File and the requirement of specifying a RTSP URL is removed.
  • An option to use the annotation value for the file name when using the Media Clip with Script export, with a corresponding preference setting
  • A new option in Export as Traditional Transcript to indent the output of overlapping, successive annotations based on the '[' character (Jefferson-style)
  • Changes in the Interlinearization mode:
  • Replaced the two configuration panels from the main layout by a button which shows the configuration options in a blocking dialog
  • It is now possible to have different settings for an analyzer for different configurations; one can now edit global and source-target specific settings
  • There is now an option to tell an analyzer to "forget" (never show again) a certain suggestion for that specific input
  • A few new options were added to existing analyzers (where applicable):
  • Match a lexical entry field's language attribute against the tier's content language when producing suggestions
  • Only produce parses in which the constituents have the same grammatical category value
  • Use the citation form as output instead of the lexical-unit (headword) value
  • Specify the character used to mark clitics in the lexicon (the analyzers treat clitics the same way as affixes)
  • A new Lexicon Editor allows to edit a lexicon and its entries in a single, separate window
  • A phonetic field is now visible and editable in the lexical entry table and editor
  • The fixes and minor changes are:
  • Support for RF64 type of Wave files in the Waveform viewer, this variant supports file sizes > 4GB
  • Fixed the wrongly located scrollbars in the TimeSeries viewer
  • An option to allow mpeg-1 and mpeg-2 files to be played by the JMMF player instead of the DirectShow player
  • Fix in handling URL's / file paths with "special" characters by the FLExParser
  • The menu item for editing an ISO data category of an annotation is functional again

New in ELAN 5.8.0 (Oct 10, 2019)

  • Tab-delimited text and CSV/TSV files can now be imported into the current, open annotation document
  • support for import of SubRip subtitles files (.srt) and Audacity label files (.txt )
  • First version of an EAF validation utility; performs XML validation and some additional checks on the structure of an EAF file. Reports the errors found (but cannot repair them).
  • An option to lock an EAF file when opening it, with a Preference setting to activate it. The locking is based on (possibly hidden) .lock files.
  • The VLC-based media player now requires a VLC 3.x player installed on the system. This player is now also available as a player in ELAN on Windows and macOS. On Windows and Linux spherical or 360-degree mp4 video is supported (to some extent). Zooming now works depending on platform and media file type.
  • An option added to the Windows JMMF media player (for .mp4 files) to save a video frame as an image with the original, encoded dimension
  • A new property has been added to the elan.properties file, allowing to set the font to use for the general ELAN user interface

New in ELAN 5.7.0 (Oct 10, 2019)

  • The time alignment of annotations on Included In tiers could not be changed anymore, an unplanned side-effect of other recent repairs for that tier type
  • Due to changes in a web service ISOcat Data Categories couldn’t be loaded and shown anymore
  • Some small improvements in the CHAT export dialog

New in ELAN 5.6.0 (May 6, 2019)

  • Some problems in Transcription Mode have been solved, related to Loop Mode and Automatic Playback
  • The play back rate of some players was set to 0 in specific situations (e.g. when switching modes), the player then seemed crashes or frozen
  • When adding a new, custom language identifier, it is now allowed to use the ‘-‘ character

New in ELAN 5.5.0 (Apr 15, 2019)

  • The main fixes and improvements are:
  • In export to FLEx, content language values of tiers are used in deconstructing a tier (or type) name into FLEx item type and language values
  • This and the changes in the previous version are now also applied to the multiple file export to FLEx
  • The export Media clip using M2-edit menu item has been removed
  • When saving a video frame as image, the Save As window now proposes a file name with time suffix and it remembers the last used image type
  • In interlinearization mode the Parse and Gloss analyzers can now both match their input also with variants in lexical entries and use these in the suggestions
  • A problem of incorrect annotation structures, appearing when creating or moving annotations on nested tiers containing an Included In tier, has been solved
  • Import of tab- or comma separated text files:
  • Tries to detect the index and type of columns and the first row of data, and use this for initial settings
  • The column selection table now better matches the preview table, location and size of the window are remembered
  • The tab can now correctly be set manually, in case it is not detected as the delimiter
  • Improved detection of the format of time values, especially to distinguish seconds from milliseconds (e.g. does 100 mean 100 ms or 100 sec.)

New in ELAN 5.4.0 (Dec 12, 2018)

  • The new feature is:
  • In Interlinearization mode, support for Toolbox dictionary format(s) has been added to the Import Lexicon function. A configuration window allows the user to map Toolbox markers to fields in an ELAN lexicon.
  • The main fixes and improvements are:
  • Fixed a problem with (not) updating the list of CV entries after a change of the CV for a tier type (in case of an ECV)
  • Changed the calculation of the row height for the Grid Viewer, based on the font and font size. Also a bug was fixed so that custom tier fonts are actually used in the Grid Viewer. Other tables with similar problems will be updated later.
  • Several improvements in the WebMAUS extension: the list of languages was updated, the results are now read with the correct (UTF-8) encoding and there is experimental support for big wave and/or text input files.
  • The language of a tier is now included in calls to WebLicht services. This might lead to an error if the language is not supported.
  • Changed the saving of Tier Sets such that tier names are properly XML escaped
  • Changed the vertical scrolling in the Timeseries Viewer (with fixed sized track panels)

New in ELAN 5.2.0 (Apr 5, 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
  • The main fixes are:
  • 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 (Dec 22, 2017)

  • The main new features are:
  • an option in the Tier menu to copy annotations from one tier to another tier. It is possible to only copy annotations with a specific value or to just copy all annotations.
  • it is now possible to modify the boundaries of an annotation by typing in begin- and/or end time in a little dialog
  • added two more options to the data extraction feature of the timeseries viewer: median and range (max – min)
  • included are now two new features based on the Java Sound API: ◦a JavaSound media player for wave files. Available on all platforms but probably mainly of interest for Linux users as an alternative for VLC and JMF
  • a new Clip Selection option in the context menu of the Waveform viewer; this variant does not depend on other software (like e.g. the Clip with Praat option)
  • a few macOS specific changes: ◦in the context menu of a video an option has been added to save the video frame in its original, encoded size (this still has to be added to the Windows video player too)
  • on macOS Sierra and higher the (native) Save and Open dialogs don’t have a title bar anymore. This bar was used to present short messages to the user (e.g. “Locate file video.mp4”), this message is now shown just below the main menu bar (maybe for the time being).
  • some multiple file import functions did not allow to add a folder, this option has now be added to all relevant functions
  • The main fixes are:
  • in the “sliced” tab-delimited text export for multiple files, the file name and file path columns were omitted from the output
  • the Zoom to Selection menu items in the Timeline and the Waveform viewer weren’t always updated correctly
  • the auto-interlinearize option in the Interlinearization mode did not work for analyzers that don’t create sets of suggestions for the user, but immediately create one or more annotations

New in ELAN 5.0.0 (Oct 26, 2017)

  • This is the non-beta release of ELAN 5.0. The main addition in version 5.0, the Interlinearization Mode, has been improved to a usable state.
  • Apart from that, a few bugs have been fixed and some other functions included. (The new features introduced in the alpha and beta version are not repeated here, see below.)
  • The main changes and new features are:
  • in the Interlinearization Mode, the lexicon component and the analyzers: ◦an option has been added to the Lexicon Actions menu to save the lexical entries in the same order as visible in the table
  • ◦double clicking a lexical entry in the table (on a non-editable cell) now opens the Edit Entry window
  • in the Edit Entry window navigation between fields is now performed with the TAB key! ENTER now applies the changes to the entry and closes the window. Other shortcuts have been added too.
  • when new entries are added, relevant analyzers are informed so that they can show up in following analyze actions
  • several settings have been added to the panels of the Lexicon and Parse analyzers to improve the suggestions they produce
  • in automatic, sequential Analyze/Interlinearize mode, the active annotation is now updated after each iteration, so that it is clearer to which annotation the next suggestions belong
  • the context menu of annotations is updated depending on analyzer configurations and tier type settings. The Analyze option will only be shown if the tier is a source for an analyzer, an Add to Lexicon item is shown if the tier is linked to a lexicon field.
  • the Suggestions View is now a “normal” window with title bar and close button
  • a toolbar has been added to the Suggestions View, with two buttons: ◾a button to reverse the order of the suggestions in the window, keyboard shortcut R
  • a check box for incremental, left-to-right selection of suggestion fragments, keyboard shortcut I
  • new options have been added to the tab-delimited text export: ◦“sliced” annotation output, a new variant of the separate-column-per-tier export mode. This creates a table which better shows co-occurrences of annotations by creating “virtual” segments based on all begin and end times of involved annotations.
  • an option to append the annotation id’s, in brackets, to the annotation values. Annotations are sometimes repeated when each tier is in separate column and the annotation id can help to distinguish annotations in the output.
  • added *.csv to the export file formats. The columns are then comma separated and textual values are surrounded by double quotation marks.
  • it is now possible (like in Simple-ELAN 1.2) to specify an application-wide default font and font size for tiers that don’t have a custom font set. This setting is in the “elan.properties” file in the ELAN install folder.
  • The main fixes are:
  • play selection on Windows with .mp4 files would often not start at the begin of the selection but continue from the end, especially in Loop Mode.
  • settings in Segmentation mode were not always stored and restored correctly when switching between modes
  • settings for Mute and Solo in the media Control Panel were not stored as a preference, added now
  • the listing of available WebLicht services failed, making it impossible to select a service
  • the macOS release contains a new export clip AppleScript which can be used in combination with the Clip Media with Script function. Stored in a .zip file in the Resources folder of the application folder. It is best to store both the (edited) clip-media.txt and e.g. the qtp_clip_10_10_export.scpt file in the ELAN data folder.

New in ELAN 5.0.0 Beta (Apr 18, 2017)

  • MAIN CHANGES AND FIXES:
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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 5.0.0 Alpha (Jan 11, 2017)

  • FEATURES AND CHANGES:
  • the Interlinearization Mode: ?a text oriented working mode with “interlinear style” layout of annotations
  • includes a lexicon component for creating and editing a simple lexicon to support semi-automatic parsing and glossing
  • combines with analyzer modules (extensions) that can perform specific tasks e.g. tokenization, suggesting morphological parses and/or glosses based on a lexicon
  • the concept of Linguistic Type has been renamed to Tier Type
  • a new version of the EAF schema, version 3.0, adding support for cross-references between annotations. There is no user interface yet for creation and visualization of such references.
  • in the Signal Viewer a zoom option has been added to show the entire .wav file (this can be slow in case of large files)
  • when saving a selection as eaf, the preferences of the current file are copied as well (so that the newly saved file has the same colors and fonts etc. as the original)
  • MAIN FIXES:
  • playing a selection in selection mode on Windows shouldn’t change the selection anymore
  • Transcription Mode in combination with a user interface language other than English works again
  • on high resolution displays the font of menus and buttons can appear small. There is no elegant solution but a preference setting in the User Interface tab now allows to set a scale factor for the main font. There are several issues, the most important one being that the row height in tables doesn’t automatically scale with the font. (Also see startup properties in the last item of this list.)
  • when switching between .wav files in the Signal Viewer the time-offset of the viewer is now updated
  • shifting an annotation would sometimes not work (or would appear not to work), it should work correctly again
  • when importing a Toolbox file containing time information in the records but maybe not in chronological order, there is now an option to let the importer sort the records before the actual conversion starts (also see startup properties in the last item in this list )
  • the “changed” flag is not correctly set when updating the location of secondary linked files
  • small improvements in positioning of the CV drop down list, opening a selection in Praat on Windows and in updating the input method language in the Edit Tier dialog
  • in “elan.properties” two new properties were added: “ELAN.UI.FontScaleFactor” for setting a UI font scale factor (see above) and “ToolboxParser.SortRecordsBeforeParsing” for activating sorting of Toolbox records at the start of the import

New in ELAN 4.9.4 (May 19, 2016)

  • The new feature is that of Tier Sets (contributed by the Sign Language Research group, Radboud University). A Tier Set is a user defined, custom group of tiers that can combine tiers independent of hierarchical relations and independent of tier attributes (like Type or Participant etc.).
  • It can be used to show or hide all tiers in a group in a single action and thus to more conveniently switch between groups of tiers.
  • define tier sets in a separate window (Edit->Edit Tier Sets…), the tiers can be extracted from a domain or from the current transcription
  • the tier sets are stored in an XML file which can be shared with team members
  • the use of tier sets has to be activated in the Preferences tab of the Edit Preferences window
  • the defined tier sets are listed in the context menu of the tier label panel where each set can be made visible or hidden
  • The main fixes and improvements are:
  • zooming in and out in the timeline viewer can now be done by commonly used key strokes (CTRL+=, CTRL+-, CTRL+0). The effect of these combinations can depend on the working mode.
  • on Linux ELAN could freeze if the VLC player was not installed
  • a few inconsistencies related to line wrapping have been solved in Export as Interlinear Text
  • an “elan.properties” file is now part of the distributions. It contains a few parameters that can be changed by the user. One of them is labeled “ELAN.EAF.Validate” which defaults to “true”. By changing this to “false” XML validation is switched off and (especially large) EAF files will load faster.

New in ELAN 4.9.3 (Feb 18, 2016)

  • The main fixes and improvements are:
  • in Segmentation Mode it looked like it was impossible to drag-modify an annotation. In fact the screen wasn’t updated properly, this is fixed now
  • in specific cases deleting a time-subdivision annotation could lead to inconsistent data, e.g. if there is a time-subdivision of a time-subdivision tier with (partially) unaligned annotations
  • when changing the font size in the Timeline viewer, the font size of the tier names is now also updated
  • importing a Toolbox file with a custom marker file (.mkr) in which built-in markers are used (e.g. \ELANBegin), no longer fails
  • the Change Case dialog now has an extended tier selection tab pane and the behavior of the check boxes is improved
  • in some places in the user interface and in some export functions there is a PAL and NTSC time format choice. Now there is also a PAL-50fps option, for 50 frames per second videos
  • in the Preferences window there is now a separate panel for the Controlled Vocabulary related settings
  • in the Recent Files menu there is now a tool tip showing the full path for file paths that have been truncated

New in ELAN 4.9.2 (Dec 22, 2015)

  • CHANGES AND FIXES:
  • modifying the alignment of annotations on Included In dependent tiers could in specific cases lead to invalid annotation structures
  • in single file search the “Add constraint” button didn’t work anymore
  • in single file search case insensitive matching now also works for non-Latin scripts
  • some problems related to highlighting (of the selection and of the media playhead) in the Text Viewer are solved
  • 2D annotation hadn’t been functional for a long time and has now been removed. The “References to Graphics Allowed” checkbox in the Edit Type dialog is no longer there
  • Merge Transcriptions in some cases converted external Controlled Vocabularies into internal CV’s
  • Korean has been added as a language for the user interface
  • 24-bits mono .wav files are now supported by the Waveform Viewer (contributed by Chris Cox)
  • the Copy Tier function now has an option to rename the original (the source) tier so that the copies can have the original name
  • a few changes to the export as Traditional Transcript Text:
  • an option to include line numbers
  • an option to use participant labels instead of tier names
  • the labels for silence duration and for annotation duration are now omitted
  • in the multiple file export as tab delimited text it is now possible to export the file name or file path in a row preceding the annotations of that file
  • in the single file export as tab delimited text it is now possible to include a “header” line with some information about the media files (duration, frame duration)
  • in Segmentation Mode clicking an annotation now also sets the selection
  • some changes in the output of the modified kappa inter-rater reliability function (to make it more in line with EasyDIAg):
  • NaN is written instead of 0 (where applicable)
  • negative kappa values are now written as 0
  • global kappa values excluding “unmatched” are not exported if the matrix is smaller than a 2×2 matrix
  • an “empty” filler value will be written for annotations without values
  • experimental support for opening a transcription and creating a new transcription by drag-and-drop (of either an .eaf file or of media files) into the ELAN window (use with care, some crashes have been observed during testing)

New in ELAN 4.9.1 (Jul 15, 2015)

  • The main fixes and a few other changes are:
  • Annotations from Subtraction didn’t work anymore in the previous version
  • the Recognizer tab wouldn’t be visible if only video was linked (no audio) exporting hits from the structured multiple file search ended with an error message and not all hits would be saved
  • switching the Suggest Panel on or off in the Controlled Vocabulary dropdown list didn’t work reliably; sometimes the list would appear empty
  • some problems related to playing a selection on Windows, in case of a master media player with a synchronisation offset, have been solved an option has been added to Change Case of Annotations to only change the first character of annotation to upper case
  • the Clip Media using Script action (and other missing actions) has been added to the list of actions that can be assigned to a keyboard shortcut
  • in the Export as Quick Time text it is now possible to select xml as output format, in which case the subtitles will be written in TeXML format (quicktime-tx3g)
  • the implementation of the Recognizer API changed such that a list of linked data files other than audio or video can be provided to a recognizer. For recognizers operating on e.g. time series / sequential data. The API and the demonstration package has been updated.

New in ELAN 4.9.0 (May 27, 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)
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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 12, 2014)

  • after the recent transfer of ISOcat, the ISO Data Category Registry, to a new hosting provider it was no longer possible to retrieve information on data categories. This function has now been restored so that it is again possible to connect tiers or annotations to a data category.

New in ELAN 4.8.0 Beta (Nov 10, 2014)

  • 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)

  • the colors of controlled vocabulary entries disappeared after closing and reopening a file
  • in the multiple file chooser window some buttons would remain disabled when only folders were in the list of selected files and folders
  • the default keyboard shortcut for opening the edit box for the active annotation, SHIFT+E, had the side effect of removing previously entered text when entering a capital E. The default now changed to CTRL+SHIFT+E (CMD+SHIFT+E on Mac).
  • minor change in activating the annotation above or below the current active annotation
  • an error that could occur with font sizes in the Interlinear Viewer is fixed

New in ELAN 4.7.2 (Jul 7, 2014)

  • This release fixes a few problems present in 4.7.1 and 4.7.0:
  • a problem in the Multiple Files Editor in case of adding dependent tiers: the list of available linguistic types wasn’t always updated correctly
  • when closing a file in Transcription mode a “Save” warning will pop up again if there are uncommitted edits (edits without a final Enter or wihtout moving to the next cell)
  • the SignalViewer in the Segmentation mode now also has the drop down menu for selecting the .wav to display. Some fixes in updating the View->Waveform menu.
  • some improvements in the painting and resizing behaviour in (especially) the Segmentation mode (probably not the last change in this area).
  • A setting for redraw behaviour can impact performance considerably. It seems that the best “Painting strategy” settings in Edit Preferences->User Interface are as follows:
  • on Windows: Paint directly to the screen

New in ELAN 4.7.1 (Jul 7, 2014)

  • This release fixes two problems introduced in 4.7.0.
  • the import of some file formats (e.g. .csv) wasn’t functional anymore
  • some .wav files weren’t accepted anymore for visualisation in the SignalViewer as a result of too rigid consistency checks

New in ELAN 4.7.0 (Jul 7, 2014)

  • The new features are:
  • 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
  • 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
  • on Linux a new media player based on VLC player is implemented and is now the default. VLC (version 2.0.x or higher) needs to be installed on the system. There are many issues but it is in general an improvement on the JMF player (Initiated by Ingo Lütkebohle.)
  • 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
  • The main bug fixes and changes are:
  • 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
  • the default setting for buffered rendering on Mac OS X has changed. In case of general slowness in the user interface, Mac users might want to change the setting via Edit->Preferences->Edit Preferences->User Interface->Painting strategy.

New in ELAN 4.6.2 (Mar 12, 2014)

  • New:
  • 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
  • Main bug fixes and changes:
  • 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
  • several problems with setting fonts and colors have been solved
  • the link to a timeseries file wasn't updated in the configuration file when it was updated in the eaf; track definition were lost
  • the setting for the folder to store Activity Monitor logs wasn't (re)stored
  • when creating multiple eaf files for media files based on a template, the preferences of the template were lost
  • 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
  • the export as Filmstrip failed when it included a waveform and the background color for the last video frame was incorrect
  • after an Undo in Transcription mode the table wasn't repainted (so that it seemed the undo didn't work)
  • when importing .cha CHAT files invalid XML characters are now filtered out of annotation content
  • 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
  • now all media files are exported to the flextext file
  • 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 available in flextext
  • multiple file import failed with an exception in the first step

New in ELAN 4.3.2 (May 29, 2012)

  • the delete/remove button in the multiple file domain dialog is functional again
  • linking more than 4 videos could cause errors. On the Mac it could lead to a crash
  • changing the font size in the Interlinear Viewer is applied correctly
  • changing the file filter in the save as dialog now correctly updates the extension of the default filename(if suggested)

New in ELAN 4.1.2 (Sep 15, 2011)

  • 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

New in ELAN 4.1.1 (Aug 12, 2011)

  • The main bug fixes are:
  • with the "snap annotations" option selected it was no longer possible to create an annotation before the first annotation of a tier: the new annotation would always appear after the first annotation
  • the order of the tiers in in the timeline viewer would not always correctly be restored when reopening a file
  • the export of a list of annotations from multiple files failed with a "Null" error
  • Transcription mode:
  • wrapping of text was not performed at word boundaries
  • the editing cell was not always visible, the table will now scroll to ensure it is visible
  • The main new features are:
  • Transcription mode:
  • the cell that is being edited now resizes while entering text
  • the maximal number of columns is no longer limited to three. A new user interface allows to change the number of columns in the table.
  • multiple file search, in the multiple layers tab:
  • dropdown boxes that allow to define constraints between the tiers in the layers have been added
  • filled in information in the grid is no longer lost when changing the size of the grid. By default the grid has now two columns
  • handling of columns in hit export has been improved
  • some menus containing a list of tiers are now "scrollable" when there are many tiers
  • in annotations from overlaps the selected tiers can now be sorted in case concatenation of values is selected
  • on Windows 7 a new approach has been implemented to attempt to use the Elecard MPEG-2 plugin, when installed, for MPEG-2 files
  • the scrollwheel can now also be used when the mouse is over the area where the tier labels are