Changelog

Here's a list of what changed for LingView, going from now (April 2021) back through the previous ~18 months. If these new features excite you, update your copy of LingView to start using them.   

New features

• Publish on GitHub! It's free, you don't need to download or install anything, and the published website automatically updates itself when you make changes. If your corpus includes large video files, you can include them in your LingView website by first uploading them to YouTube. Web publishing with LingView used to take days or weeks, but now you can go from "what's LingView?" to a published corpus in just a few hours.
• Video on FLEx files! LingView now supports .flextext files as source documents. (Flextext is the format used for exporting a file from ELAN to FLEx or vice versa.) The new format can include timing information and can therefore be displayed with synced audio or video, which was not previously possible with FLEx files.
• Search your corpus! Sentences matching your query will show up as you type. You can restrict your search to specific languages or tier types.
• Link to specific sentences! Click the number or timestamp next to a sentence in your ELAN or FLEx file. Now copy the URL that appears at the top of your browser. When you visit the URL, the same sentence will be highlighted. Great for citations and collaborations.
• Multilingual navigation! LingView has always supported a wide variety of languages in the FLEx and ELAN files, but it only used a single language for page navigation. Now visitors to your page can choose from English, Spanish, or French navigation using a dropdown menu at the bottom of the page. You can add (or remove) navigation languages by providing additional translations.

Small updates

• The LingView Wiki has grown! We've expanded the troubleshooting guide (https://github.com/BrownCLPS/LingView/wiki/Preprocessing-errors), listed out the metadata used by LingView (https://github.com/BrownCLPS/LingView/wiki/Metadata), and added instructions on how to use all the new features.
• Easier software updates! This is especially for "power users" who added their own custom color scheme, features, glossary page, etc. to LingView. If you're using GitHub, our new "Prepare Upgrade" workflow can reconcile all the latest changes to LingView with your own customizations, so you can update LingView without losing your work.
• Update metadata online! The new "Edit Story Metadata" workflow is an interactive way to change document descriptions, titles, and dates from the comfort of your browser, without having to install or download anything.
• Streamlined builds! When you build LingView using a terminal, you only need to type one command (not two), and the output has less clutter, so you can easily skim for error messages if anything went wrong.
• Streamlined index! The "Index of Texts" page now displays everything in one, scrollable page even if there are a lot of texts.
• New pages! We added blank "About" and "Glossary" pages to the navigation bar. Fill these in to tell visitors about your LingView site, or take them out if you don't want them.
• Flexible layout! If you make your browser window skinnier, the navigation wraps onto a second line, making the navigation bar more readable on narrow screens.

Things that were broken, but we fixed them

• You can now open your offline LingView website in Chrome, and the page will load properly instead of being blank.
• We no longer removespacesbetweenwords when there are ácceñtéd cháracters in the text.
• We no longer add "undefined" to the transcript when the FLEx file contains an empty word. Thisundefined oneundefined wasundefined weirdundefined.
• Windows powershell users rejoice! A couple of the "npm run" commands for buiding LingView only worked on Mac, but now they work on Windows too.
• If you build a compact offline copy of your LingView site, the audio and video works instead of being missing.
• If you delete a FLEx or ELAN file and then rebuild LingView, that file goes away. It doesn't haunt your LingView index like a vengeful ghost until you remember to run the delete script.
• (May 2023) LingView now uses Node 16.x instead of the much older Node 12.x, which GitHub is ending support for.