Sum: AVMs on Windows

[Piotr Banski]

Hello,

A while ago I posted a query asking about tools that
can be used to prepare HPSG-like attribute-value
matrices under Word 97. Because there seem to be quite
a few interesting ways of getting that done, and
because was asked for a summary, here it comes.

Firstly, I would like to thank all who answered my
query: Anna Feldman, Tylman Ule, Norman Creaney, Tibor
Kiss, Shravan Vasishth, Stephen Wechsler, Georgia
(Green?), Mayumi Masuko, Damir Cavar and Adam
Przepiorkowski.

The summary is organized as follows: first I write
about how to create AVMs inside Word, then I move on to
write about native Windows software in general, and
finally I move on to TeX-related software. The fourth
category is something interesting that I wasn’t able to
include elsewhere.

1. M$ Word

This is going to be primarily about Word 97, cause
that’s what is available to me.

1.1. Fonts

This is the most primitive way of creating AVMs (which
I’ve used for a while...). The Symbol font contains
some bracket fragments that you can use to create
feature matrices. The result is invariably ugly and
you’re better off using fixed-width fonts if you want
to draw anything complicated. The only advantage, if
you want to call it that, is that there is no problem
with boxing characters - you can do it
straightforwardly via Format|Frames.

1.2. EQ Fields

I currently use a Polish version of Word, so I hope I
recall the English names correctly when I say that you
can insert fields via Insert|Fields...

The following, when put in a field, draws a simple
feature matrix and puts it into square brackets.

EQ \b \bc\[ (\a \al \co2 \vs3 \hs3 (COMPS;<>;SPR;<>) )

You can box characters in this way too, via the
\x \to \bo \le \ri() switch, so the following works
too:

EQ \b \bc\[ (\a \al \co2 \vs3 \hs3 (COMPS;<>;SPR;<\x
\to \bo \le \ri(1)>) )

(It boxes ‘1’ within the SPR list)

Finally, you can also nest square brackets and use
angled ones:

EQ \b \bc\[ (\a \al \co2 \vs3 \hs3 (COMPS;    \b \bc\<(
);SPR;\b \bc\<(\b \bc\[ (\a \al \co2 \vs3 \hs3
(PERS;3;NUM;PL)))))

Those who use a dot as the number separator should use
a comma to divide the matrix elements (I use a comma as
a separator, and this is why I have to use semicolons
in the field).

1.3. Auto-images

Another option, suggested to me by Anna Feldman, is to
use Insert|Picture|Auto-images and pick square brackets
from the palette. After you insert the pair of
brackets, you can right-click on it to insert text into
them.

This is possibly faster than inserting fields (though
what are macros for...), and character boxing is not a
problem here either, but it seems more suitable for
numbered examples, whereas fields are ok both as free-
standing examples and as part of the text.

Another drawback is that at least in the Word version I
use, brackets are not really square, it’s more like a
cross between square and round brackets.

There are some options available for such auto-images,
like tieing them somehow to text fields, which I
haven’t tried cause using the Equation Editor (see
1.4.) seems much less problematic.

I think Georgia (Green, as I guess from the address)
wanted to suggest something similar, via the Microsoft
Draw program. This embeds the auto-image in a picture
object, and the result can be indeed better in some
cases, like when you want to have more than one pair of
brackets or some text associated with the picture.

Another difference between auto-images on the one hand
and fields (1.2.) or equations (1.3.) on the other is
that the latter automatically adjust their size to what
you put into them, and here in many cases you have to
do that manually.


1.4. Equation Editor

This option seems the most widely used (quite
unsurprisingly, cause it’s rather handy). It was
suggested to me by Tibor Kiss, Norman Creaney, Stephen
Wechsler, Mayumi Masuko and Adam Przepiorkowski.

You reach it via Insert|Object from where you have to
pick ‘Microsoft Equation 2.0’ (I believe version 3.x
exists as well, though I haven’t tried it).

Then, you just pick the kind of brackets you want and
the rest is fairly intuitive, and if not, the help
files are quite informative.

If the Equation Editor is installed in your M$ Office
package, double-clicking on a EQ field (cf. 1.2) turns
the field into an embedded EE object.

There seem to be two problems with the EE. The first is
I guess common to the EE, fields, and auto-images and
it concerns the level of embedding, which is pretty
shallow, as Stephen Wechsler tells me.

The second problem is that you have to forget about
boxed characters if you want to use the EE - there is
no way to box something EE-internally. I tried various
ways of smuggling boxed characters inside EE objects
(like pasting them from the text, or boxing things in a
field and then turning it into an EE object) but
everything failed, and Stephen Wechsler and Tibor Kiss
confirmed that they weren’t able to get boxed
characters there either (recall though that I have
version 2.0 at my disposal, perhaps things change in
later versions).

Tibor Kiss suggests putting characters into frames and
pasting them into the EE, but if that means framing
characters via Format|Frames, thay way is not available
at least with my software (Word 97 + EE 2.0), as I
mentioned.


2. Native windows applications other than M$ Office

2.1. Expressionist

This is what Stephen Wechsler says he uses to create
AVMs. It also boxes characters. And it’s $-ware,
apparently, but I wasn’t able to tell for sure cause
the original company that produced it
(http://www.maplesoft.com) sold the project to
<http://www.livemath.com> who promised a new release
(3.25) for December but failed to deliver. The new
release is definitely going to be $-ware.

I guess that Expressionist is like the EE - it can run
on its own and its objects can also be dynamically
embedded in Word (or other) documents.

2.2. MathType

This is another $-ware alternative to the EE. See
<http://www.hallogram.com/science/mathtype/>. It
appears to be full of interesting features.


3. (La)TeX based Windows software

I was pointed towards (La)TeX variants by Damir Cavar,
Adam Przepiorkowski and Shravan Vasishth.

In general, if you’re interested in using (La)TeX, you
might want to look at the *very* informative pages
maintained by Andrew Bredenkamp and Doug Arnold,
located at <http://clwww.essex.ac.uk/latex4ling/>.

The page at
<http://www.fz-juelich.de/isr/1/texconv/texcnv.html>,
maintained by Wilfried Hennings, lists some converters
between TeX and PC (and Mac) word processors.

There is also a mailing list maintained by Dag Langmyhr
and designed for linguists who use TeX, with very
interesting archives. See
<http://www.ifi.uio.no/~dag/ling-tex.html>.

3.1. Scientific Word and related products

Check out <http://www.mackichan.com/>. $$-ware, lots of
features, apparently.
You can get 30-day trial versions of all the software
there.
Thanks to Damir Cavar for telling me to look for it.

3.2. Form Edit

This editor uses WinEmTeX (included in the distribution
- this means around 40 MB package...) to generate
pictures which you can later import into Word.

See
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Launchpad/5437/

3.3. MiKTeX

Thanks to Damir Cavar for telling me about MiKTeX -
this is what I decided to use. MiKTeX is a freeware
Windows port of TeX and various TeX-based software, see
<http://www.miktex.de>.

It is nicely packaged and regularly maintained by
Christian Schenk, with a friendly and informative
mailing list too.

Thanks to Shravan Vasishth for pointing me towards
Chris Manning’s page
<http://www.sultry.arts.usyd.edu.au/cmanning/>, which
contains a style file for creating AVMs, together with
a manual, as well as pointers to other interesting
places (like the Stanford archives where you can get
other TeX utilities for e.g. drawing syntactic trees).

3.4. LyX

LyX is a WYSIWYG TeX-based editor for Windows, which
requires Cygwin support and an X-server to run.
See <http://www.student.uni-
koeln.de/cygwin/Distribution/Binary/?item=lyx> (the
dash there is a part of the address) for details, it
looks extremely interesting and I haven’t tried it out
only because of how big the whole cygwin distribution
is (download problems...). Freeware.
Something a bit surprising that I noted about it is
that it seems to be a ‘native cygwin’ application (one
would think this an oxymoron) - no source code or at
least binaries for operating systems other than Windoze
are provided.

4. ‘Other’ software

Here I list software which doesn’t fit easily into any
of the above categories.

4.1. LT Thistle

Thanks to Tylman Ule for pointing me to this very
interesting software which is primarily Unix based, but
there exists a port for Windows 95 too.

It is written in java, and comes as a browser plug-in
or as a standalone version. You need a java package for
the latter, e.g. the freeware kit straight from the
source: <http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/1.2/>
(~20MB).

I haven’t managed to try it out yet, but be sure to
check out
<http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/software/thistle/demos/index.h
tml>, to see some of the amazing things Thistle can do.
Free for non-commercial use, it comes with a tutorial
and reference documentation. There is a mailing list
devoted to it too.

This is what Jo Calder, the author, says about it:

> Yes, it is possible to run Thistle under
> Win95/NT/...
>
> The simplest option is probably to use it via a
> Web browser.  See
>
> http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/software/thistle/demos/exa
> mple_hpsg1.html
>
> and links from there for examples.  Some people
> report OK behaviour by creating diagrams using the
> demo programs and using screen capture to a
> graphics format such as JPEG.  The result may not
> be of the highest quality (particularly if you
> scale the graphic).  If you're using a later
> version of Word --- 8.0, I think, you can choose
> the (misnamed) option `Save as PostScript', to get
> a PostScript version of the diagram, to import
> into Word.
>
> Of course, the downside of this is that you can't
> save diagrams from one session to the next.
>
> If you want to run Thistle directly under Windows,
> you can download the code (after completing a
> licence agreement).  There are some caveats
> though.
>
> The only version of Thistle which you can start
> under Windows by point-and-click is rather old.
> (It still covers the relevant diagrams from
> P&S94.)
>
> You will need to hand edit a .bat file to choose
> which class of diagrams to edit.

(Editing that .bat file is nothing one should be afraid of, btw. -
it's very well commented.)

4.2. MathScript

This is not exactly on topic - an Amiga product which I
stumbled on while searching the web. Advertised as a
kind of Equation Editor.
<http://www.mathscript.pair.com/>

-----------------

Thanks again to all who helped me put this together. I hope that
others on this list will find this summary useful. I might post a
follow-up if I find myself suddenly bombarded with some further
interesting info on this topic :)

Best wishes,
Piotr

---
Piotr Banski <bansp at bigfoot.com>
Institute of English Studies
University of Warsaw
Nowy Swiat 4
00-497 Warszawa
Poland