Figure 1.32. Tier Selection panel in most of the dialogs

Different ways to select tiers :

	Note
	To select multiple tiers, press Shift and click on the successive tiers or click and drag the mouse along the tiers to select them

Other options :

Similar to exporting a document to Shoebox (see Section 1.4.1.22) ELAN data can be exported to a Toolbox document with an UTF-8 encoding. This export provides more options for output customization.

To export a file into Toolbox, do the following:

ELAN allows you to export your project to the SIL Fieldwork Language Explorer software, also referred to as FLEx. The data exchange is realized through .flextext files, a file type that defines several container elements and attributes (see below), onto which ELAN's tiers (via their tier type) and annotations have to be mapped. For the configuration of these mappings the complex, multiple step export window described below, is provided. Configuration will be less complicated in case the .eaf was created by importing a FLEx .flextext file. On import, some FLEx attributes are "encoded" in the names of tiers, on export these attributes are reconstructed by "decoding" the tier names. To better understand the options in the user interface, a simplified representation of the structure of a .flextext file follows here.

              <interlinear-text>
                <item lang="" type="">...</item>
                <paragraph>
                  <phrase>
                    <item lang="" type="">...</item>
                    <word>
                      <item lang="" type="">...</item>
                      <morph type="">
                        <item lang="" type="">...</item>
                      </morph>
                    </word>
                  </phrase>
                </paragraph>
              </interlinear-text>
            

All elements can occur multiple times, e.g. there can always be multiple item child elements for any parent element.

	Note
	If your .eaf file contains multiple participants, make sure you have given each participant a name value. You can set a participant value under Tier > Change Tier Attributes....

Choosing File > Export as > FLEx file … will give you the following screen:

Figure 1.35. Export FLEx file step 1

In this screen you can specify:

Figure 1.36. Export FLEx file step 2

The second screen allows to:

Figure 1.37. Export FLEx file step 3

The third screen allows to customize the FLEx lang (language) and type attributes output:

The final screen allows you to save the file as a flextext file, so it can be used in FLEx.

	Note
	On the third-party resources page of ELAN (https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan/thirdparty ), you can find a teaching-set which covers the aspects of importing from FLEx to ELAN and back to FLEx.

All documents can be exported into a tabular format for purposes of further analysis and/or printing. This includes documents that were created by ELAN itself (see Section 1.2.2 and Section 1.2.5) as well as documents that were imported into ELAN from any of the supported formats. Do the following:

If your ELAN annotations contain syntactic elements, it is possible to export these to Synpathy^[2] (see https://archive.mpi.nl/forums/t/synpathy-software-information/2649). This function is available via File > Export as > Tiger-xml…

First select out of the candidate tiers the one you want to be exported. Afterwards, map the tiers onto the correct description ("word" or "pos"). Finally enter the name of the file (*.tig).

This function (File > Export as > Interlinearized Text...) is very similar to ELAN’s printing system. Therefore more information can be found in Section 1.2.18. The main difference is that the width of the exported text depends in this case on the number of characters that fits on one line.

Figure 1.41. Maximum line width

After selecting an appropriate layout click on Save as and choose a location and file name. These files can afterwards easily be edited with any text editor (preferably using a fixed-with font). Optionally tick the Insert tabs between annotations box if you prefer to have the white space between annotations to be filled with tabs instead of spaces (especially useful when importing a text file into Word). If Insert tabs between annotations is selected, you could also have single tab instead of multiple white spaces. To do that tick Tabs Instead of Spaces box if you prefer to have tabs instead of multiple white spaces.

Similarly to the export to interlinear text (see Section 1.4.1.7) you can also export annotations to a HTML file, through the File > Export as > HTML... menu.

Figure 1.42. Export as HTML

The only extra option for the HTML export is

In some situations a straight-forward list of the annotation units, one after another, can be handy. For that cause an export option to a “traditional transcript text” has been added to ELAN. In its simplest form it just will create a text file containing the successive annotations of several tiers, in chronological order. This feature can be found under File > Export as > Traditional Transcript Text....

Figure 1.43. Export Transcript Text

"Restrict to the selected time interval' allows you to export only the data that is currently selected. (see Section 2.8.1).

'Wrap lines' sets a maximum number of characters before the line gets wrapped.

'Merge annotations on the same tier...' makes it possible to merge annotations on the same tier if the gap in between these annotations is less than a certain amount of milliseconds.

You can number the annotations, each wrapped line, and include or exclude tier labels or participant labels in the export.

One of the options enables you to include silences with a minimal duration. The figure shows there is a silence of 0.2 seconds between 'yeah' on the tier K-Spch and 'and then you go the other ...' on the tier W-Spch. The first annotation ends at 00:00:04.400 seconds and the next annotation begins at 00:00:04.600 seconds, resulting in a silence of 0.2 seconds. If this silence was shorter than the minimal silence duration entered in the export dialog window (20 ms in the figure), the silence will not be included in the exported file. The silence duration indication can have 1, 2 or 3 numbers of digits after the decimal.

Empty lines after each annotation (block) can also be included or excluded in the generated output file. Lastly, you can set a fixed width (in number of characters) for the tier labels.

The option to use Jefferson-style alignment based on "[" characters in overlapping annotations, can change the position of parts of annotations by vertically aligning corresponding "[" characters. (Alignment of matching "]" characters is not supported yet.)

This export function (File > Export as > Time-aligned Interlinear Text...) produces interlinear output but, unlike standard Interlinear Gloss, the formatting is based on time alignment . This is achieved by using a monospaced (fixed width) font in combination with a customizable character-to-milliseconds calculation factor. As a consequence, depending on this factor, the export might cut off part of the annotation value.

The export offers a few text styling options (underline, bold, italic) and the output format is (simple) HTML.

Figure 1.44. Export settings

The ouput can be customized in various ways:

After changes in settings the Apply Changes button updates the preview. The Save As... button starts the actual export, currently html is the only supported format.

Figure 1.45. Different export settings

When you wish to work with your annotations in Praat, ELAN enables you to export your annotation to a Praat TextGrid. To do this, click File > Export as > Praat TextGrid.... In the dialog window that appears you can select the tiers you wish to export(Section 1.4.1.1) and specify whether you want to restrict the output to the selected interval.

After clicking OK, you can enter a file name and select an encoding. In addition to TextGrid files in the default encoding for the operating system, ELAN supports Praat TextGrid files with UTF-8 and UTF-16 encoding. Finally click on Save.

The preliminary export function File > Export as > WebAnnotation JSON... stores annotations according to the W3C Web Annotation Data Model specifications. This model and format are intended to enable sharing and reuse of annotations across applications and platforms.

Figure 1.46. Export settings and JSON preview

The export window offers a few options to customize the output. Apart from the possibility to select the tiers to export and to only export the selected interval, there are a few format specific options which determine which information is included and how it is structured. After changing settings, the Update button applies the settings and updates the preview on the left side of the window. The Export button initiate the actual export to a .json text file.

Sometimes it can be very useful to have a alphabetical list of (unique) words from one or more tiers. ELAN offers a way to generate such lists. Go to File > Export as > List of Words ... and select the tiers(see Section 1.4.1.1) from which you want to extract the words. The annotations of the selected tiers will be tokenized (split into words) using either a default set of delimiters or a user definable set. Check Count occurrences if you want the list to include the number of occurrences for each token. The Include overall totals in the export file option results in some basic overall statistics at the end of the file. The Include frequency percentages in the export option adds another column to the output, containing the percentage of each unique word (or annotation) of the total word count. After selecting tiers (or better, deselecting unwanted tiers) you can click OK and choose a file name. Clicking Save will save the word list.

ELAN supports export to SMIL^[3]-compliant clips. With a suitable player this enables you to view media files and the associated annotations as a subtitled movie.

Another format you can export to from ELAN is QuickTime subtitle Text. To do this, go to File > Export As > QuickTime Text.... Select the tiers(see Section 1.4.1.1 ) you want to be included in the subtitles. Optionally specify the following options:

Finally click on OK. By default the subtitles are stored in a QTtext .txt file. If you enter a file name with the extension .xml the subtitles are stored in a TeXML - tx3g formatted XML file (the merge tiers option is ignored in that case).

Besides the QuickTime subtitle Text (see Section 1.4.1.15) ELAN can export annotations to there are few other subtitle formats: SubRip (.srt), Spruce (.stl), Timed Text Markup Language(ttml) (.xml) and LRC (.lrc) . Click on File > Export As > Subtitle Text... and select the tiers(see Section 1.4.1.1 ) you want to include in the subtitle file. Specify whether the subtitles should be restricted to annotations in the selected time interval, whether the time of the selected interval should be recalculated form zero and if the master media time offset should be added to the annotations times. The third option lets you specify the minimal display duration of a subtitle. For instance, if a annotation is only 0.3 seconds long, but you want to display a subtitle at least 0.5 seconds, enter 500 (ms).

Figure 1.49. Export as Subtitles text

After you have selected tiers and specified the options, click on OK. Enter a file name in the next window and click on Save.

Tiers for the recognizers are exported in the AVATech tier format. A brief description of the AVATech tier format can be found in this document: Avatech-interface-spec-2014-03-06.pdf. Files can be exported as .txt, .csv and xml.

ELAN supports any command line tool that can extract clips from a video (or audio) file. For that purpose it uses a script file named "clip-media.txt" which can be found in the folder where ELAN is installed. In most cases some configuration needs to be performed in the script file, e.g. which command line tool to use, before clipping can succeed. Therefore ELAN first checks the (see Section 1.1.2) for the presence of the "clip-media.txt" file, before trying this file in its installation folder. By copying the customized "clip-media.txt" file to the data folder, the changes are accessible to all versions of ELAN.

Mac OS users will have a default execution line in "clip-media.txt" looking like this:

osascript ./scripts/qtp_clip_10_7_export.scpt $in_file $out_file $begin(sec.ms) $end(sec.ms)

Which means that an AppleScript script in the "scripts" folder will be executed when clipping media. There is also a pdf file in the ELAN installation folder to help Mac OS users with editing the syntax.

Windows users can e.g. put a copy of ffmpeg.exe (or ffmbc.exe for clipping mp4 files) in the folder where ELAN is installed (or modify the execution line such that the full path to ffmpeg is included). You can find ffmpeg and ffmbc online.

If you want to use the syntax for ffmpeg, remove the # in front of the line starting with 'ffmpeg.exe -i ......... If you want to use the syntax for ffmbc, remove the # in front of 'ffmbc.exe -vcodec copy....... Make sure the syntax you do not want to use has a # in front of it, this comments the line out.

The syntax for ffmpeg can be: ffmpeg.exe -i $in_file -vcodec copy -acodec copy -ss $begin(sec.ms) -t $duration(sec.ms) $out_file

ffmpeg.exe : the path of the application

$in_file : specifies the input file

$out_file : output file

vcodec copy -acodec copy : copy both the video- and audiocodec

$begin(sec.ms) : specifies the begin time frame of the clip

$duration(sec.ms) : the duration of the clip.

Look in the script file for more explanation and examples. If it is not possible to edit the script file due to file permissions, copy "clip-media.txt" to the Section 1.1.2 (and modify it to use an absolute path to the clipping application).

A few examples for command line tools are:

C:\ffmpeg.exe -i $in_file -vcodec copy -acodec copy -ss $begin(sec.ms) -t $duration(sec.ms) $out_file

C:\ffmbc.exe -vcodec copy -acodec copy -ss $begin(hour:min:sec.ms) -t $duration(hour:min:sec.ms) -i $in_file $out_file

To clip a media file first make a time selection and choose File > Export As > Media Clip using Script.... A dialog will appear in which you can set the file name and the location to save the clipped file to. You can specify more options for clipping in the Preferences dialog, see Section 1.3.

Note

If you have more media files to be clipped, typing a file name with a extension in the 'Save as' dialog will use the same extension for all the files that will be clipped. If you want to use the same extension from the original media file for the clipped files, then don't type an extension with the file name in the 'Save as' dialog which prompts you to set the file name and location for the clipped media files.

To export an image from the ELAN window (i.e. to make a screenshot):

Figure 1.51. An exported filmstrip image

To export a Filmstrip Image first select the time segment you want the filmstrip of. Then click File > Export As > Filmstrip Image.... In the dialog window (see Figure 1.52) you can define the width of each video frame, which frames to include and whether ELAN must add a time code in each frame. Moreover, ELAN can add the waveform, with or without a ruler, and specify the height. You can also specify whether the stereo channel should be displayed separately or merged or blended. Click on OK to generate the image. Finally select a destination folder, enter a file name and click on Save.

An example or an exported filmstrip image can be seen in Figure 1.51.

Figure 1.52. Exporting to a filmstrip image

This option allows to save an image of a graphical representation of the density of annotations on selected tiers. This is the same functionality, with the same customization options, as in View > Annotation Density Plot...(Section 2.18.3).

All Shoebox files that were imported into ELAN (see Section 1.4.2.10) can be exported back into Shoebox. In this case, the time code information is kept.

To export a file into Shoebox, do the following: