General

What operating systems does XLingPaper run on?

Windows Operating Systems, Mac OS X, and Linux

Does it work with Non-Roman Scripts?

Not as nicely as we’d like. You can determine which font(s) to use. Please note that while keying right-to-left scripts works, editing assumes a left-to-right positioning which can be confusing. We recommend doing any editing of right-to-left scripts in some other editor.

How do I find the XLingPaper user documentation?

To see the XLingPaper user documentation, load your XLingPaper document and then use the XLingPaper menu item / Show XLingPaper User Documentation. It is near the end of the list of XLingPaper menu items.

I’ve been using XLingPaper with version 5.3 of the XMLmind XML Editor. I now want to upgrade to use version 7.4+ of the XMLmind XML Editor. What do I need to do?

There are several steps:

  1. See the instructions for getting version 7.4+ of the XMLmind XML editor.
  2. See the instructions for downloading and installing the latest XLingPaper update package. Be sure and get the one for XXE 7.3+ for your operating system.
  3. Run the newly installed version of the XMLmind XML Editor. You should now be able to open any XLingPaper document in the XMLmind XML Editor.

I installed the XMLmind XML Editor and used a Full XLingPaper installer, but when I use the XMLmind XML Editor, there is nothing for XLingPaper. What is wrong?

One possibility is that XLingPaper is available, but you are not seeing what you expect to see. Try this:

  • With the XMLmind XML Editor running, use File menu item / New. If the ensuing dialog has “An XLingPaper File” at the top, then you do have XLingPaper. Create a new XLingPaper document using this dialog or close the dialog and then open an existing XLingPaper document.

Another possibility is that the version of the Full XLingPaper installer is not the same as the version of the XMLmind XML Editor you installed. Check the Downloads page and make sure you installed the same version for both.
If you are running on Linux and are using ‘sudo’ to run the XMLmind XML Editor, then it is not finding the XLingPaper configuration files (which should be in your home directory in the .xxe5 folder or the .xxe7 folder, depending on which version of the XMLmind XML Editor you are using). Try running the XMLmind XML Editor editor without using ‘sudo’.

I’m using Linux and every time when I run the XMLmind XML Editor, it asks me if I want to check for updates. Also, it does not remember the files I edited before. What is happening?

We’ve seen this sometimes. It seems that sometimes a certain directory or two get set to ‘root’ for the owner and group instead of your user name. Try this:

  1. Start up a Terminal
  2. Change directory to your home directory (it will probably default to it).
  3. Type ls -la and hit the Enter key.
  4. Look for the .xxe5 or .xxe7 directory.
  5. If its owner and/or group is set to ‘root’ and not to your user name, type sudo chown -R your_user_name:your_user_name .xxe7 (or use .xxe5 if you are using version 5.3) and hit the Enter key.

That should fix the problem.

I’m getting an out memory of error message when loading a large file. What can I do to make it work?

See this workaround for when XMLmind is out of memory for what to do.

How can I make the font size larger for everything in the XMLmind XML Editor?

Use Options menu item / Preferences / General. Under Display scaling, click on “Use custom settings”. Set the percentage you want. Note that you will need to exit and restart the XMLmind XML Editor for the change to take effect.

References

I refer to a vernacular work that has a title but no author in my references. How do I do that?

Leave the refTitle element blank and put the book title in the normal place for the author.

Is there a way to insert a reference to a work that is quoted in another book? For instance, If i want to cite (Doe 2020) when it is actually a journal article that is quoted in a book. How do I get the citation format for Doe, John H. 2020. “Syntax and baked beans”. Language and Culinary Studies. 23:1-21. quoted in D. Jane 2030. Syntax for the starving graduate student. Chicago. University of Chicago Press.

Try saying something like this: “D. Jane (2030:235) quotes Doe (2020) as saying, ‘Eating beans makes me hungry.’” Then put each reference in the reference section as normal.

I have a url element but the link does not work in the default PDF. What might be wrong?

If the URL contains a tilde character (~), replace it with the sequence %7e.

Publisher Style Sheets

How do I change a publisher style sheet when it is not quite what I need?

Rather than editing the ‘master’ set of style sheet files, please use the File/New to create your own publisher style sheet. You can then change the elements and their attributes as you need. When you are done creating your own style sheet, you can save it in one of your own Documents directories and associate your style sheet with one or more of your XLingPaper documents.

By not modifying one of the ‘master’ style sheet files, you will not run the possible risk of losing your changes the next time you update XLingPaper since these files will be overwritten during the update process.

Another possibility is to find the ‘master’ style sheet file(s) you want and then make a copy of them to somewhere in your Documents area. You can then edit this/these file(s).

One other thing to keep in mind whenever you use a referenced document in XXE is that you must use the ‘Open referenced document’ and ‘Edit referencing document’ commands to go back and forth between the main document and the referenced document. If you don’t, the changes in the referenced document will not be seen by XXE until you open the main document again (or start up XXE again).

See the XLingPaper Publisher Style Sheets User Documentation for more information.

I made a change in the References Layout of my publisher style sheet, but the change is not being seen. What can I do?

This can happen when your main document has a “referenced document” (the main part of the publisher style sheet) and this publisher style sheet also has a referenced document to the references layout. When you edit this doubly nested document, the XMLmind XML Editor does not “see” the change in it. To fix this, you can use View menu item / Redraw from your main document. This will force the XMLmind XML editor to see the change.

How do I make the word “Appendix” appear before the appendix letters in the Contents?

What we have available is in the contentsLayout element in the front matter section in the publisher style sheet. There are two relevant attributes on the contentsLayout element:

  1. useappendixlabelbeforeappendixletter set to yes will put “Appendix” before the letter in the contents
  2. useperiodafterappendixletter set to yes will put a period after the appendix letter

So setting these two will give “Appendix A. ” followed by the title of the appendix.

How do I get the word ‘Appendix” to appear before the letter in the appendix portion itself?

In the appendixTitleLayout, set the textbefore attribute to have ‘Appendix ‘ (without the quotes). Assuming you want a period after the letter, set the textafterletter attribute to be ‘. ‘ (without the quotes).

PDF Output

When I produce a pdf the first time, all the page numbers in the table of contents come out as ??.

It is normal for the page numbers in a table of contents to be ‘??’ the first time the PDF is produced. After that, the numbers should appear.

My image is coming out huge in the PDF. How can I make it smaller?

Take a look at Appendix D “Special Attributes for the Default XeLaTeX Way of Producing PDF” in the user documentation. It has a table. What you want is to use the scaled value in the XeLaTeXSpecial attribute of the img element. Try making it be, say,
scaled='700'
and see if that makes the image small enough. If not, play with values until it looks good.

Also, if it turns out that the vertical alignment is not quite right, you can play with the vertical-adjustment value. (Be sure and put a space between the scaled value and the vertical-adjustment value.)

Tables

A table goes off the page in the PDF. How do I fix this?

See the first bullet point in section 11.17.1.1 in the user documentation.

Is it possible to have table notes that appear directly following a table? I know it’s possible to put them in as endnotes that will appear as footnotes at the bottom of the page (depending on what format is used to output the paper). I would prefer the notes to appear directly following the table however, if possible marked by a separate, non-numeral marker. This would be especially important if the format used for final printout uses endnotes instead of footnotes – one would not want table notes to appear at the end of an article.

The only current way to do this is to do it manually:

  1. Insert the symbol you want at the point of the note (you may need to use an object element to get it show as superscript).
  2. Add a row at the end of the table which spans all columns and insert the note contents there (preceded by the symbol).

Is there a way to change the font size of an entire table without changing all the individual cells?

Do these steps:

  • Create a custom type element:
    1. Open up the Types section,
    2. Click on the yellow “Add your custom types here”,
    3. Do an insert after and choose type
    4. Give it an ID
    5. Set the font-size attribute to what you want. Consider using a percentage, say 85% or some such if you want the font size to be smaller.
  • For each table, do
    1. Click in the table somewhere
    2. In the node path bar, click on the top-most table element.
    3. Set its type attribute to the ID of the type you created above.

    Then the table should come out with a font-size reduced by the percentage you set in the new type element.

I’ve been unable to find information on how to orient text within a table cell from bottom-to-top. Is orienting text in this way possible? What I’m trying to do is rotate the orientation of the text by 90 degrees, so that, in a three letter word, the first letter would appear below the second, and the second below the third so that, if the page were rotated clockwise 90 degrees the text could be easily read.

I’m sorry, but no, there is no way to do that other than to create an image file and place it in that table cell. (It could be PDF.)

I am getting an error message that says “the sequence of child elements is incorrect” I assume that means something in the parent node is wrong, but I can’t see what it is that the program doesn’t like. I have scoured the user documentation and I cannot find any section related to how to fix errors. Is there a link to the exact error that the program is referencing (within my paper) and if so how do I find that. Once I’m there how do I fix this particular error?

Ah, this was probably a case of trying to add a new row to a table by using the Insert After / tr approach instead of using the XLingPaper menu item / Table Row… approach.

To get the “sequence of child elements is incorrect” to actually take you somewhere, use View menu option / 0 (no style sheet). This will show the file in a very ugly fashion, but it has all the gory details. Now try clicking on the number in the Validity Tool. It may well take you to a tr element that does not have any embedded td elements or some such.

I’m wondering if there’s any way to align the left edge of a table (as an example element) with the left margin. I’ve managed to align the example number with the margin by editing the example attributes, but it’s be very helpful (especially with wider tables!) to be able to align the table itself with the margin.

No, sorry, there is no current way to make the table show up at the left margin when it is within an example. It will always be to the right of the example number.

You could consider using a tablenumbered element for these tables, though. See section 6.4.3 “Numbered Tables” in the user documentation.

Graphics

My graphics objects (rules, trees, figures) take up huge amounts of screen. Is there some way to make them smaller on the screen while editing?

There are height and width attributes for img elements which let you adjust how the image appears in the XMLmind XML Editor. Near the end of section 6.2 in the user documentation, it now has this paragraph:

Sometimes the graphic appears very large within the XMLmind XML Editor. You can make it appear smaller by setting either the height or the width attribute (or both) to a number. This value indicates the number of pixels to use for showing the graphic image. Some possible values are on the order of 300 or 500, depending on your screen resolution and the size of the XMLmind XML Editor window on your computer. Please note that these values are just for showing the image within the XMLmind XML Editor. They are not used when creating any of the XLingPaper output formats.

What kind of graphics formats are best to use with XLingPaper?

Use SVG/PDF whenever possible because no matter how large the PDF viewer is made, the images still look great; other formats (like .jpg and .png) get grainy as the page is enlarged in the viewer.

When you need to use .png or .jpg, try and make the image file be as large as reasonable (so that if it gets enlarged in the PDF viewer, it gets grainy at only higher sizes).

Also see the previous question for how to make the image smaller in the XMLmind XML Editor.

My graphic is coming out the wrong size in the PDF. What can I do to adjust its size?

For the default PDF output, on the img element you can play with the XeLaTeXSpecial attribute. See appendix D “Special Attributes for the Default XeLaTeX Way of Producing PDF” in the user documentation. It has a table of various possible values for this attribute. Try using scaled=’750′ (or whatever value makes it look good) and maybe also vertical-adjustment=’-2pt’ (or whatever value makes it align vertically well). You may not need the latter one. If you use both, be sure in insert a space between them (and be sure to use single quotes and not double quotes).

I just added a graphic file and now it won’t produce the PDF. What might be wrong?

If the location of your graphic file is a long way from where your main document is, try moving that graphic file closer to where your main document is located. Apparently XeLaTeX has a limit on the size of the path to a graphic file and if the path is too long, XeLaTeX won’t find the file.

Referenced Interlinear Texts

I’m using a referencedInterlinearText element to refer to an interlinear text in another document. I’m also using XXE version 7.2+. When I load my master document, I get a validity error of “element has no attribute “xml:lang” [cvc-complex-type.3]”. This error has a red background color. How do I fix this?

This is caused by a mismatch in the xml:lang attribute of the lingPaper element between the two documents (the master document and the document containing the interlinear text). If your document containing the text, say, has the xml:lang attribute of the lingPaper element set to “es” but the xml:lang attribute of the lingPaper element of the master document either has the xml:lang attribute of the lingPaper element not set at all or set to something other than “es”, then you will get this validity message. To fix it, make sure that both documents have the same value in the xml:lang attribute of the lingPaper element. (If the xml:lang attribute of the lingPaper element is empty in both or in the document containing the interlinear text, then you will not get this message.) Note that after changing the xml:lang attribute of the lingPaper element in the master document, you may need to shut down XXE, restart it, and then reload the master document before it will stop showing the validity message. Further, if your master document is large, it may take a very long time for the change to the xml:lang attribute of the lingPaper element to take effect.

Miscellaneous

I want to include morpheme glosses with my word examples. Is there some way to do this? Or an alternate formatting that would still contain all the same information?

Yes. See section 5.1.2 “List of Words examples” in the user documentation, the last paragraph and its two examples.

At some point recently my section references started behaving strangely. Up to about halfway through my document, sections reference normally; after that, when I try to insert a section reference, I can scroll down to the one I want in the pop-up list, but in the document it just shows “s”, and in my export the reference is blank. The list of sections that pops up when I hit F11 is also weird, in that the sections which reference correctly are listed as e.g. 2.1.3 {sMerriamData}, while the ones that fail to reference correctly do not have a number or curly brackets, merely e.g. sReflMetathesis. I can’t find any reason for this or any way to correct it; do you know what’s going on?

You probably have a double quote character (“) in the section title (secTitle) element of some section. If you replace that with a “smart” double quote, then it should work fine. See section 11.12 Key ‘smart’ quotes? in the user documentation.

I am interesting in inserting a +/- symbol where the minus symbol is stacked under the plus symbol (this is for denoting optional elements in Noun or Verb Phrase formula). How do I do this?

There are two possible ways to do this.

Possibly the easiest is to use the “insertCharByName” command that comes with XXE (although it does not seem to appear in the XXE Help file). To invoke this command, type
Esc C (that is, press the Esc key, release it, and then type a capital C). This brings up the Insert Character dialog. It shows a list of character abbreviations (followed by the actual character).

Scan down for the character you want or, if you happen to know its abbreviation, start typing the abbreviation. The dialog will show only those abbreviations that begin with what you have typed.

For the plus/minus symbol, use ‘plusmn’. Then press the Enter key.

The second way to key such a special symbol is to use XXE’s Character Tool. It is usually located on the lower right hand side between the Spelling Tool and the Validity Tool. Click on the capital Omega to show this tool. It shows a lot of the Unicode range, 256 characters at a time. Look for your character in the list and click on it.

I am doing language documentation. As part of this, I need to have a file of just the transcription of a text, or just the transcription and free translation. These would not be part of a larger ‘complete’ document. So how should I handle a complete document that is limited to an interlinear text?

Try creating a new paper document (Complete Document / Paper (Section-oriented).

Delete the second section.

Open up the first section.

In your interlinear text document, click on “Interlinear text:” and copy.

Back in section 1 of the new paper document click in the first (empty) paragraph and do a paste after command.

You should now have your interlinear text in this section and there should be a language element with the lVernacular ID. The PDF output by default will not show the section title if there is only one section.

Font not showing correctly in the editor and/or in default PDF on Windows

There have been several cases reported where a font was not displaying correctly in the XMLmind XML Editor and in the default PDF output. In all cases it was on Windows and in all cases the user had installed a new version of the font in question. It turned out that there were duplicate instances of that font installed. (Why Windows allowed duplicates, I have no idea.)

Two solutions have been used for this.

One solution was to get a tool like TypoGraf to see what fonts are truly installed, find the duplicates, delete them, and re-install the one version of the font desired. Please note that it is crucial that you run TypoGraf as Administrator when you try and delete a duplicate font. If you do not, it will look like the font is deleted but it will not be.

The other solution was to rebuild the font cache for Windows. The user followed what is in this forum tutorial.

I was wondering if anyone knew of a good way to handle examples with bar notation for tone. I need to have the line of phonetic tone heights then a line with the segments and have the tone line up above the vowels. When i try to add spaces to examples or tables to make them line up, it strips the spaces out. Any ideas?

Two ideas come to mind:

  1. Rather than using spaces, use non-breaking spaces. See section 11.13 “Key a non-breaking space” in the user documentation. Also, if you have not already done so, see the “Tone ligatures” index entry (at the end of the user documentation).

  2. Use a graphic editing tool like the free Inkscape to draw what you want. See example (11) in Sylvia Riggs’ Beginning Tone Analysis for Amatlán Zapotec paper for one such example.

I started my document as a paper and now I need to change it to a book. How can I do that?

  1. Convert your paper document to a chapter in a book by following the instructions in section 11.47 “Convert a Paper to Be a Chapter in a Book” in the user documentation.
  2. In the new document, open up the chapter element.
  3. Click on the first section1 element and then use XLingPaper menu item / Promote entire selected section; copy to clipboard.
  4. Click on the last chapter element in the document (which will be the one and only the first time).
  5. Do a Paste After command.
  6. Repeat steps 3-5 until all the section1 elements have become chapter elements.
  7. Click on the first chapter element and delete it. It is no longer needed.

How can I get a word count of my document?

There is no easy, direct way, unfortunately. One can produce either a Word document or a PDF and use tools available to get word counts from those. See this thread on word count in XLingPaper for more.