Transcriber's History

History of Transcriber versions

Version 1.5.1

Changes or bugs fixed:

Upper extensions are now recognized as valid extensions for transcription and audio files.
A DTD different from trans13.dtd or trans14.dtd is not considered anymore as a former DTD.
All unicode encoding are now supported on Windows
Transcriber 1.5.0 refused to be launched if it found an external speaker database. That file was created when the speaker turns were modified. That bug has been corrected.
The default browser (used for viewing help files) could not be set. This bug has been corrected.

Version 1.5.0

New or modified functions:

A new DTD (trans-14.dtd) replace the old one (trans-13.dtd). For compatibility, files that need an older DTD can be opened with Transcriber-1.5.0. For such files, save or exit without any changes will display a message that inform you that the original format of your file is older than the format of your Transcriber application. You can choose to export in new format (recommended) or keep the original one.
improvement of the "save audio selection" function: the menu entry is now "Save audio segment(s)" with two submenus "Selected..." and "Automatic...". You can also reached this function with contextual menu by right clicking on the signal and look in "Audio file" entry. The first submenu do exactely the same as the old function (i.e. save an audio selection) and the second one is an automatic mode to save all the audio segemnts corresponding to section, turn and sync. A dialog box allow you to choose wich kind of segment do you want and where you want to save it in.
the event tags can now be translated when displayed in Transcriber, but they are not translated in TRS files.
the binary released 1.5.0 is now available on Linux, Windows
the spell checker is now Aspell and works on Linux and Windows
help files are now viewed with the default browser
shape computation for large files is now available on Windows
help files are available in German
now, when you destroy a begin or end event it also destroy the symetric associated event.
trs files are associated to Transcriber on Windows
shortcuts F1 to F7 are available. F1 is for help, F2 to F7 are used to hide or not the different parts of the interface (text, NE, command button, first and second signal view and message display).
creation of a new event "Named entities" for named entities (NE) annotation. The F3 button is a shortcut that make available an interface to easily annotate NE. Automatic annotion is possible and every colors or fonts are configurable. The list of entities can also be modified. More details in the reference manual.
creation of a global speakers database which contains all the global speakers you have imported in it. Import is done by Edit->Speakers->Update global speakers database, then you have to select the file from wich you want to import global speakers. More details in the reference manual.
transcription files may use a different format than the original one provided with the package, provided that they point to a DTD located in the same directory, that their root element is still <Trans> and that they are in a superset of the existing format. Unknown XML tag will be only displayed in gray, but may not be edited. Any XML file whith <Trans> root tag is now supposed a valid .trs file, regardless of its actual extension (it used to be limited to .trs and .xml).
it is possible to define a default topic or speaker import file, loaded when opening a transcription or creating a new one, using 'Edit/Speaker|Topic/Automatic import from selected file'
export a transcription to text format in a simple "Speaker i: transcription" format; control over the formatting may be done by setting some configuation values on the command line or in the configuration file - see convert/text.tcl for more details (NB: a beta version of this filter was already distributed in the 1.4.6)
display of NIST RT'03S .mdtm format (speaker subset only).
added "-version" command line option.

changes or bug fixes:

removing of lrec documentation (useless)
removing of html_library (useless)
Migration of user preferences to Transcriber 1.5.0 (Event widget size is reset)
popups Find/Replace, Find Speaker, Find Topic, Spell Checker, Control Panel, Informations are now in foreground
a warning window pops up if more than one transcription line is deleted
fixed bug : an error message appeared when doing File/Synchronized Audio File/Add Audio File. That made the function unvailable.
fixed bug : on some platform when using the Num_lock key, the edition was impossible.
fixed bug : when changing localisation (for example english to french) the contextual menu of the wave were not translate so that when you wanted to open an audio file, an error message appreared.
a warning message is displayed when temporal inconsistencies are found in a .trs file.
Export to .stm format now includes a commented header giving information about the conversion process, and the file is written in the user-defined encoding (rather than the default system encoding) - it may be possible to override it on the command line e.g with 'trans -set encoding utf-8 -export stm *.trs'.
multiwav extension now has a menu entry in the main 'File/Synchronized audio files' menu.
'Open segmentation file..' has been moved frome 'Options/Display' to 'File' menu.
default string for new speaker or topics may be modified (currently only by editing the default settings or the configuration file, see etc/default.txt).
improved parsing of LDC hub4 files in sgml/utf formats for segmenation display.
bug corrected in the "-set" line option.
bug corrected in saving a modified localization file.
command line option "-export" may be used instead of "-convertto".
Transcriber is launched in batch mode (i.e. with tclsh rather than wish) by 'trans' script when -export or -help command line options are found.
under Tcl/Tk 8.4, it should be possible to open multiple files in a single dialog for the multiwav and segmentation features.
convert filters using the extended tcl API 'readSegmtSet' have been made backward compatible with previou versions (<1.4.6).

Version 1.4.6

Released on October 3, 2003.

New or modified functions:

multiwav extension, allowing several synchronized audio files to be