Callisto provides a number of features which make it an easy tool to use for annotations tasks of all types. An important note is that this list is always growing as we address feedback provided. While effort is made to keep documentation up to date, please bear with our discrepancies. Please submit your own feeddback using our contacts page.
Callisto's main window is broken into two parts, the 'Main Text Pane' on top, and the 'Editor Pane' on bottom. The editor pane is generally customized for the annotation task at hand, while the main text pane is expected to remain fairly constant. The text in the main text pane cannot be edited, only annotated.
To annotate text, swipe the text of interest, and click the desired 'New annotation' action from the context menu or by using the text palette/default action (See below). The new annotation will become the single selected annotation (see Selecting and De-selecting below).
Callisto provides visual indicators of annotations on regions of text (by changing the associated background color). To create a new annotation on a given portion of text the user must "swipe" or "select" the desired region of text. This selection of text also provides a visual feedback to the user. Both of these kinds of visual feedback we refer to generally as "highlighting." The user of Callisto needs to understand the distinction between selected/swiped text and selected annotations.
"Selected" annotations appear in the text with black highlights above and below. "Swiped" text is what most editors and browsers refer to as "selected" text, created by left-clicking (usually the left button) and dragging over some text to "highlight" it. "Highlight" is an ambiguous word in Callisto, and we try to use it within context. To 'de-swipe' text, click in an area of the text pane with no text, or press the escape key (while the main text pane is active). Different actions are available at different times depending on what annotations are selected, and whether or not text is swiped. This is reflected by changes in the context menus and Text Palette (see below).
More than one annotation can be selected at a time. An annotation automatically becomes the single selected annotation when it is first created from text. Select a different annotation by clicking the left mouse-button over it. Additional annotations can be selected by holding the SHIFT key down while clicking other text annotations with the left button. To de-select annotations press escape (you need to do this twice if text is also swiped) or select a different annotation.
When text annotations are created, all of its extents are set to the same values. As in the case with ACE EDT Mentions, some text annotations can have multiple extents. To change an extent of an annotation, simply select the annotation to change, swipe the region of text you wish the extent to be, and click the appropriate 'Modify' action in the text palette, or context menu (see below). If there is only one extent (as in RDC Timex) there will be only one Modifier option. For multiple extent tags (such as EDT Mentions) there will be one modifier for each extent. Note that there may be special handling operations associated with such actions. For example, for EDT Mentions changing the head extent will always be associated with a check that the new head extent is contained within the full extent, even if this requires changing the full extent at the same time.
When annotations overlap, it can be very hard to tell what annotations exist on that part of the text. The annotations in the text panel can be inspected by moving the mouse cursor over an annotation. At the bottom of the main text a gray 'panel' will display a text representation of whatever annotations are under the mouse. When more than one annotation exists at a point, each will each appear on a separate line. To bring an annotation to the 'front', from behind, press the tab key, while the mouse is over the overlapping tags in question.
Different languages can have vastly different glyphs and
concepts of tokenization. To accommodate, Callisto allows
text to be swiped in units of characters or words. The
word segmenter is a modified version of the standard Java
WordBreakIterator which breaks hyphenated words into
multiple tokens. Change the Swipe style (either Word or
Character) from the Callisto MenuBar: Edit->Swipe
Text by Word
Right-click on items will often bring up a specialized pop-up menu of actions available for the item under the cursor. Swiped areas of text, selected annotations, and rows in tables, all have context menus. The main text pane's context menu duplicates the actions provided in the Text Palette (see below), providing a separate means of working, depending on the annotator's preferred style.
The 'Avalable Actions' tool is a floating window that shows the actions available to the main text pane, as buttons. The 'default action' is activated by clicking the middle mouse button in the main text pane. Buttons in the text palette duplicate the text pane's context pop-up menu (see above), with a small round toggle button next to each, indicating which is currently the default. Actions will become disabled depending on what the annotator is doing at any given time (see Selected vs. Swiped above), and if the default action becomes disabled, clicking the middle mouse button will have no effect.
Some annotation tasks use multiple tables in tear off tabs. These tabs can 'float' separate from the main window. To tear off a tab, click the 'floating window' icon in the tab you wish to tear off. Floating windows are automatically reattached by closing them. Floating windows remember their positions between annotation sessions.
The user can quickly change the font size in the main
text pane from the Callisto MenuBar Format->Font
Size->...
Java has the ability to display most languages of the world which have character sets in the Unicode standard. You must however have fonts installed on your computer to view these other texts (see the Install section above). Callisto takes advantage of this by choosing the most appropriate font for the text being annotated. Currently Callisto can only annotate files with UTF-8 or US-ASCII text (which is a proper subset of UTF-8), although we intend to handle conversions from other character sets in the future. If Callisto fails to recognize a font which should be rendered Right-to-Left, you can quickly change the orientation by selecting "Right-to-Left Orientation" in the Callisto "Format" MenuBar.
The user can set various user preferences in the
'Preferences Dialog' which appears by selecting Edit->Preferences...
in the Callisto MenuBar.
Each task defines it's own preferences and annotation highlight colors. These can also be edited in the preferences dialog. In the lower portion of the preference tree you see an item for each task known to Callisto. Each task's editor panel includes a table to edit the highlight colors it knows of.
Tags may be 'hidden' from view from a task's Preferences as well. This can make the tagging task much easier by clearing clutter in the text document. Each tag has a checkbox which will toggle the tags visibility in the text pane. Visibility is remembered between sessions.
All tags are visible by default.