Editing ATF with Nammu

Introducing Nammu, Oracc's new ATF editor

Nammu is Oracc's new, platform-independent editing software for creating transliterations, lemmatisations and translations of cuneiform texts. It is being written for us by Raquel Alegre and Jens Nielsen of UCL's Research Software Development Team.

• Download the current release of Nammu
• Follow these installation instructions

If you are an existing Oracc content-creator and have been editing ATF in Emacs, that's all you need to do. You'll find that Nammu is an intuitive replacement for Emacs, and that you can use all the Oracc keyboard shortcuts as usual.

New to ATF?

If you haven't edited ATF before, you may also want to download:

• our keyboard for cuneiform transliteration
• and/or one or more unicode transliteration fonts

You should also read the online help pages on learning and using Oracc ATF and on lemmatising.

Do contact any one of the Oracc Steering Group (Eleanor, Jamie, Niek, or Steve) if you would like to have your own Oracc project space (which can be public or private, as you like).

Tips and tricks

Nammu now has all its core funcationality – you can edit real texts with it unproblematically -- but it is still under development. If you like you can join the oracc/nammu group on Github to:

• watch for new releases
• see which aspects of Nammu are currently being worked on, and
• most helpfully for us, report bugs and issues.

Here are some ease-of-use features that we're currently working to enhance:

• At the moment there is no line-wrapping, so you have to scroll across for long lines.
• Nor is there any search/replace facility yet — also coming soon, we hope.
• There's no split screen option yet, either, so for the moment I suggest that you create translations in your usual word processor as you lemmatise, then paste them into Nammu for validation when you finish. It works for me!

For more details see here.

More about Nammu

Nammu has some built-in help but you can also:

• watch a video of me using Nammu to edit a tablet from Tell Khaiber
• watch the whole video, in which I introduce Oracc and Tell Khaiber
• read Raquel's slides about the programming and principles behind Nammu
• ask any one of the Oracc Steering Group (Eleanor, Jamie, Niek, or Steve) for further help!

Installing EmacsW32 on Windows 7

The Emacs installation documentation at http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/builder/emacs/ now includes instructions for installing EmacsW32 on Windows 7 (shown in bold). Do let us know if there are any leftover problems with it.

Updated documentation

Over the past week or so I've had a jolly time checking that all the Oracc documentation is up-to-date and reflects current practice, and that all the links work. I won't list every tiny change here, but would like to draw your attention to a few points in particular:

All users: Citing Oracc URLs online and in print

Oracc 2 makes systematic use of stable URIs, so that you can be confident that print references and online links will remain valid. That means, though, that some details of the instructions on how to cite Oracc pages and resources have changed.

Mostly for editors and managers: Oracc language codes

If you have already read my overview of how the new lemmatiser works, you'll know that now you always need to specify Akkadian dialects (unless you are producing ATF for CDLI) and that glossary merges must now always specify the language. I've also worked those changes systematically through the documentation.

For editors and project managers: builder documentation

Editors and project managers will also notice that I have rearranged the list of builder documentation. It's still all there as before but now, I hope, in a more logical order.

For project managers: glossary management

I have incorporated the L2 updates into the sections on glossaries in the pages on project management with Unix and project management with Emacs (and written it into the rest of the documentation).

For project managers: The Oracc Command

This page has been reorganised and updated, so that it is easier to find help on the commands you most need for everyday project management work.

And you'll now find a Documentation full text search at the top of every documentation page.

If you notice anything wrong, broken, missing, or just plain confusing, please let me know, either in the comments or by email. The documentation is for you, the users and project creators, so please tell me if (and how) it isn't serving your needs.

ATF on Emacs

(For editors and project managers)

We still need to do a little work on updating Emacs ATF mode for Oracc 2. Until that happens, here is a list of what is and isn't working, and how to work around the latter.

ATF menu

Available when you have a .atf file open.

Check ATF

Lemmatise Buffer

Create Template

ATF Mode help

All working as usual.

Harvest Notices

Count Lemmata

Not working at the moment but neither is essential to the editing process.

Browse ATF docs

Links to a dead page. Go to the Builder Pages instead.

CBD menu

Corpus-based dictionary menu for project managers; vailable when you have a .glo file open.

Check CBD

Lemmer Update

Rebuild

Not working at the moment; you should manage glossaries through Unix instead

Project Maintenance Mode

CBD Mode help

Working as usual

Browse CBD docs

Links to a dead page. Go to the Manager Pages instead.

ORACC menu

For project managers; accessible from the Project Maintenance Mode item on the CBD menu.

Check Project

Merge Glossaries

Not working at the moment; you should manage projects through Unix instead—and note that the merge command now needs to specify the language

Harvest Glossary

Working as usual

Rebuild Project

Working but no longer recommended; use ncr or nor in Unix instead

Please do let me know if you have any problems or questions.

New documentation

As the new-look Oracc comes onstream, you will find that it looks a little bit different, and that you can do a lot more with the texts than before. In particular, Steve has dramatically improved the search functionality. People making projects and corpora on Oracc will also, we hope, notice several significant improvements.

I have updated the online help pages for Oracc website users and for project creators. Please take the time to read the pages are most relevant to you, as they will help you get a great deal more out of Oracc. If you have any questions or problems, or can't find what you're looking for, please leave a comment here for me.

Links to help from the Oracc homepage will be reinstated shortly. What you see at the moment is just temporary, while the upgrade is in progress. Meanwhile they are here on the right.

For all Oracc website users

• Using the new-look Oracc 2 online corpora

You can also access this page from the Help button at the top of all Oracc corpus pages.

Note that this is a different URL to the old help pages, which I haven't yet taken down. So if you have bookmarked the old ones, please update your bookmarks. The main user help page has been updated though.

For Oracc project creators

• L2: how to use it

A one-page starting point for all editors and project managers, with links to all the relevant new documentation. You may not need all of this if you don't run a whole project single-handedly; just stop reading when it no longer seems relevant.

Not much has changed in fact, especially for text editing. You will find that lemmatisation is much improved; that you have much more control over individual languages, dialects and glossaries; and that projects rebuild much faster than they did before.

If your project has not yet been migrated it will be soon. We will email you when we are ready for your input. As the new system is much more rigorous than the old one, you will almost certainly have to spend some time error-checking and bug-fixing before you can continue routine work. Be prepared! Remember too that you will need to think of a new password.

New project passwords

If you are the manager of a project, please contact your liaison to obtain a new Oracc password. You will not be able to log into your Oracc project without it. There is no hurry to do this: please wait until you need to use your project account again.

Choosing a password

Your liaison will help you choose a strong password. It must be:

• at least eight characters long
• composed of a mix of upper and lower-case letters and/or digits and/or punctuation (i.e., at least 3 of these 4)

When you have agreed on a suitable password, your liaison will set it for you.

Logging in again

Even if you and your project editors normally access your Oracc project using Emacs or Aquamacs, the first time that each of you logs in after the password change you must use Terminal or PuTTy in order to initialise the secure connection. Instructions are on the Project Management through Emacs page.

In addition, depending on your computer's security systems, Terminal or PuTTy may tell you to delete your known_hosts file, and will tell you where to find it. To delete this file it is easiest to use Emacs: type ctrl-x ctrl-f and enter the filename (on Macs it is ~/.ssh/known_hosts). Simply delete the contents of the file, save and close it. Then go back to Terminal/PuTTy and try the log-in again.

If you have any problems or questions with the initial log-in, please contact your liaison.

Piwik

Piwik log-in isn't yet functional but will be soon. More to follow...

Documentation updates

We've added a few useful odds and ends to the Oracc documentation over the past few months, which I thought it would be useful to summarise here:

• How to report a new sign value to Niek when the ATF checker complains of an unknown value;
• How to search the Qcat (catalogue of compositions) and request new entries;
• A list of Akkadian roots;
• How to add linguistic annotations to project glossaries;
• Fuller information about discourse divisions;
• And several new options for the oracc command.

As always, just ask if you have any questions or problems - or any suggestions for correcting, improving or adding to the documentation.

new Aquamacs

If you use Aquamacs (Emacs for Mac) to edit files on the Oracc server, you'll be delighted to know that the new release of Aquamacs does not require the endless retyping of passwords that the older versions do. I've been using Aquamacs 2.3 for several days now and strongly recommend it.

To install it, just open your current version of Aquamacs, choose "Check for updates..." on the Aquamacs menu, and follow the instructions you are given. Alternatively, you can go to http://aquamacs.org/download.shtml and download it from there.

If you have any problems with this, as always, let me know.


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Logging in into Oracc for the first time

If you're trying and failing to login to your Oracc project for the first time since the move, the problem might have one or more of the following causes:

1. All project passwords were reset to the default on the move. Try logging in with the default (if you don't know what I mean, please email me) and then change your password to something more secure, by typing passwd at the prompt and then following the instructions. Your new password should mix uppercase and lowercase letters, and use non-letter characters too.
2. If you are running Win32Emacs, you need to trash your old atf-mode files before you install the new ones: see here.
3. Before you can use Emacs for project work, you will need to initialise the secure connection by following the instructions here.

If these three solutions fail, email me. (Steve is away until August now.)

New doco structure

As you'll see, the Oracc documentation is much fuller and more systematically organised than the old CDL doco. It's fully searchable from the Oracc home page.

You'll also find that visitors to your website can access all the user help from the [HELP] link at the left of every Page View and Item View header on your corpus pages.

But if you think anything is missing, or needs further explanation, please let me know.