To start ELAN, do the following:
The initially empty window is displayed in which you can open different kinds of documents.
The main options in the File menu for creating or opening a file are:
*.eaf
) (Opening an existing document)
*.mp4
, *.mpg
,
*.wav
). This is not for opening an existing annotation file
(*.eaf
) (Creating a new document).
Other dialog windows will appear and prompt you to enter the names and locations of the different files. Then the ELAN window appears and displays the selected files.
Once you have started ELAN and opened a document, use the File menu to open, create or import a second document. When done with a document use Close (Closing a file) to close it or Exit (Exiting ELAN) to close all files and exit ELAN.
Elan supports various user interface languages. You can set an interface language at any given time. To do so, choose Options > Language and select one of the available languages.
The selected Language does not influence the content of the produced or edited
*.eaf
files in any way.
At present Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, English, French ,German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Korean language modules are available. However, new languages can be easily added. If you want to provide a translation for a different language, please contact the ELAN development team.
Alternatively, you can immediately incorporate a new translation as follows. In the
directory locale
under the directory where ELAN is installed, you
will find the files ElanLanguage.properties
and
SearchLanguage.properties
. These files can be used as a basis for
your translation. Copy the files to the directory .elan_data (Linux and Windows) or
Library/Preferences/ELAN (on Mac OS) in your home directory and simply edit the entries
in the files. To view the result of the translation, click Options >
Language and select Custom.
In case you have a media file but no annotation file (*.eaf
,
*.txt
, *.trs
), click on
File > New. Next, a
New Transcription dialog window (see Figure 1.2, “The New Transcription dialog window: media”) will be displayed, e.g.:
Do the following:
*.mov
) then select All Files, or
one of the other format filters, in the Files Format
dropdown menu. Whether or not a media type is supported depends on your software
configuration.
*.mp4
, *.mpg
,
*.wav
, etc.) to select it. It now appears in the rightmost
box. Alternatively, you can click on the media file name and click on the
>> button afterwards.
*.etf
) to be
used:
An ELAN window containing the new document appears.
The actual appearance of the window(s) shown for starting a new transcription can differ considerably depending on the operating system.
Alternatively, you can start a new project by simply opening ELAN. Instead of choosing File > New, just browse to the files you wish to work with from within your explorer (e.g. the Finder in OSX, or Windows explorer), select them all and then drag n' drop them onto the ELAN main window. A new transcription will be opened containing the selected media-files.
An ELAN document can have an author. To set the author, click Edit > Set Author.... Enter the name of the author and click OK. It is also possible to add information concerning the license policy or policies that apply to the document, click Edit > Document Properties...
A License can consist of a URL, a license text or both. Multiple Licenses can
be specified.
Sometimes one has two or more video files of the same recorded scene, e.g. when 2 different cameras were used. In that case it may happen that both recordings don’t start exactly at the same moment. In order to fix this, one should synchronize the videos. Synchronizing is the process of working out the gap (offset) between the start times. When played together, the start point of the earlier source is shifted forwards to this offset. This can be done in two different ways:
- If you know the amount of offset for a video, you can enter it by activating the Linked Files dialog window (via Edit > Linked files…
Double-click the offset time for the video you want to alter and enter it in
milliseconds. Click Apply to save.
- If you do not know the offset time, please follow these steps to synchronize your videos:
See Changing the links to media files for changing the order of the videos, i.e. the order of appearing in Player 1, Player 2, etc.
If you changed the media file synchronization of a file that already is annotated, you might want to move the annotation units all together to the right (later, positive value) or to the left (earlier, negative value) on the time axis. This can be done using the Annotation > Shift all annotations … menu (see also Activating and deactivating the Bulldozer mode or Shift mode):
This process won't delete any annotation. If the annotations are shifted to the left, the maximum shift will be restricted by the leftmost annotation unit.
In case you have an ELAN file (*.eaf
) of a media file
(*.mp4
, *.mpg
, *.wav
etc.), click Open in the File
menu.
The Open dialog window will be displayed:
Do the following:
*.eaf
).
An ELAN window containing the document will appear.
Alternatively, instead of clicking File
Open, you can drag and drop an *.eaf
file directly from your file-explorer (E.g. Finder in OSX or Windows explorer) onto
the
ELAN main screen. The document will open and an ELAN window with the document will
appear.
You can only open files of the ELAN annotation format (*.eaf
).
If you try to open a file of a different format, the following error message will
appear:
To open an existing ELAN file which is available online, at an accessible remote location, select File > Open Remote File... and enter or paste the address or URL in the box that appears.
Click OK to open the file. Due to network latency opening a remote file can take considerably longer than opening a local file.
A convenient way to reopen a file that you have previously been working on is the File > Open Recent File dropdown menu. The maximun number of files shown in the list, can be set in the User Interface panel of the Edit Preferences window (See Editing preferences).
If you open up several annotation files, you can get an overview of the currently opened documents under the Window dropdown menu:
Click on one of the files to select it. Or use the keyboard shortcuts SHIFT+DOWN or SHIFT+UP to activate the next or previous window in the list.
All documents can be saved as ELAN files (*.eaf
, ELAN
Annotation Format). This includes documents that were created by ELAN itself (see
Creating a new document) as well as documents that were imported into
ELAN from Shoebox/Toolbox, CHAT, Transcriber etc.(see Import from). To save a document as an ELAN
file:
Apart from the *.eaf
file, a *.pfsx
file
will be written as well. This file contains user- and document- specific settings
like
the font size used to display text. The *.pfsx
file can, however,
be safely removed as it does not contain any annotation data.
You also can save in .eaf version 2.7 This is the old version of .eaf (prior to ELAN 4.7) If you have used the controlled vocabularies for instance in ELAN 4.7, and save to eaf version 2.7, you may lose some information (colors may not be remembered for instance).
Apart from saving a whole document you can also store the contents of a certain time span to an .eaf file, using the following steps:
If annotation units overlap with the selection, they will be shrunk until they fit within the selected interval.
*.eaf
.
*.eaf
file. (For more details on clipping the media see Media clip using script
.)
*.eaf
file.
Sometimes a file won't open or behaves strangly when edited. Although there might
be
messages in the log file, it is often unclear what the problem is. It is possible
to
validate an *.eaf
file and receive a report of errors found. This
process performs an XML validation and additionally checks the file for the most common
other errors encountered in *.eaf
files. To start the
process:
Not all possible errors are detected, just the most common ones:
Errors in the file are not repaired by this process; if the file still opens in ELAN, it might be possible to apply the necessary changes, otherwise the file might need to be corrected in a text- or XML-editor.
Under some circumstances it might be useful to combine the contents of two separate transcription files into a single one. To achieve this, follow these steps:
*.eaf
file.
*.eaf
file (i.e. as a result the second file's annotations
are followed by the first file's annotations).
*.eaf
file.
*.eaf
file
(please note, the last annotation does not always end at the time the video
file ends but can occur before that time).
*.eaf
file (hence after a given
time position).
The tiers of the first source are shown as a reference; these don't have to be selected because the first source is always copied completely. The sort buttons allow to list the tiers alphabetically, ascending or descending. The second list shows the tiers of the second source. They can be selected individually or all at once through the Select All button. This list of tiers can be sorted as well, independently of the tiers of the first source.
A template offers the possibility to reuse the same document setup for more than one media file. This includes:
Saving a template is done as follows:
.etf
See Creating a new document for instructions on using a template.
When saving a template a preferences file is created alongside of it. This preferences file will be used when a new document is created on the basis of the template.
As from ELAN version 2.4, the possibility exists to explicitly change the links to
media files that are linked from an *.eaf
file. This option can be
handy if, for instance, you have moved media files to another location after the last
time you edited an ELAN file.
Activating the Linked Files dialog window (via Edit > Linked files…) will get you the following screen:
The following options are available on the Linked Media Files tab:
*.eaf
file.
The Linked Secondary Files tab shows files that are linked as secondary files. In particular, files that contain data that need to be displayed by the Timeseries Viewer (see The Timeseries Viewer) are found here, but other files may be linked as well. The following options are available:
*.eaf
file.
ELAN allows you to create automatic backup copies. To create backups, do the following:
A check mark appears next to the selected time interval. From now on ELAN will
automatically create a backup copy into the same directory as where the original file
can be found. It will be saved with the extension *.eaf.001
. Before
opening such a file, rename its extension to .eaf instead of
*.eaf.001
. It is possible to use a pool of backup files, the size
of which (maximum 5) can be set in the Preferences panel of the Edit Preferences window
(See Editing preferences. ELAN will rotate the files in the
pool.
Automatic backups can only be made after a file has been saved! If you did not save your file before, a warning window will be shown when the backup should be made for the first time, urging you to save the file first.
Through File > Page Setup, you can alter the paper size and other settings such as orientation, etc. of the pages to be printed.
The fine tuning of the print result can be done by opening the Print Preview window, which is accessible via the File > Print Preview menu.
Tiers settings:
After choosing the desired font size, click on the Apply Changes button in the Print Preview window. After that, the changes will appear:
ELAN offers the possibility to open wave files (or a part of them) in Praat[1]. To achieve this, follow the steps below:
Make sure you are using a recent version of Praat (higher than 4.0.5), otherwise this feature will not work.
Similarly to opening a selection with Praat you can also carve out a selection and
save it as a separate wave file. Make a selection (see How to make a selection) and right-click in the waveform viewer.
Choose Clip Selection With Praat. The selected part will now
be stored in the same folder as the original *.wav
file, with a
suffix like _23718_25110.wav, the numbers represent the begin and end, expressed in
milliseconds. The selection will also be opened in a new Praat screen.
To close a file that is being viewed/edited without exiting ELAN use the File > Close menu option. Alternatively you can also close it by clicking on the arrow in the right upper corner or by pressing CTRL+W.
To quit ELAN wand to close all opened windows, press CTRL+Q or do the following:
If you exit ELAN without having saved the changes (see Re-open recently accessed files), the Saving transcription dialog window appears, e.g.:
Check mark the files for which you want the changes to be saved. Click
OK to save the changes or click
Cancel to return to ELAN.