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Alembic Workbench User's Guide

6.3 Tag Preferences Editing Instructions


The tag preferences file indicates:
The preferences file consists of multiple lines of the form:

"Tag Type" "Attributes" "Abbreviation" Foreground Background [Editable?] ["Accelerator"] ["MenuAbbreviation"]

Note: Square-bracketed items are optional. The items in each entry are positional. Therefore, if you are creating a new preferences file with a text editor, take care not to omit any items until you finish specifying all of the previous, pertinent ones.

The Tag Type is the SGML Generic Identifier. For example, ENAMEX is the Tag Type in <ENAMEX TYPE=PERSON>.

To view or create tags that contain quote characters, e.g., ENAMEX TYPE="PERSON", the quotes must be included and escaped with a slash.

The Attributes can be replaced by * if you want any tag with that basic Tag Type to behave as indicated, or can contain a * if you want to specify a necessary subset of the attributes. Note: If you use a wildcard, note that when adding a new element of that type, the element will only contain specifically described attributes, and the asterisk will be ignored. Use {} as your list of attributes if you want to specify a tag with just a base Tag Type (just a Generic Identifier) and no attributes. Note that end Generic Identifier tags, i.e., </Tag Type>, are never explicitly specified in the preferences file. Instead, they are automatically created in the form </Tag Type> by the Workbench. To display a tag in abbreviated form in the tag line (or "mouse line"), specify an abbreviation. Abbreviations are used only for display purposes, and are not consulted when creating tags for SGML-encoded files.

Specify Foreground and Background colors to view the tag in those colors. All tags will be shown on the tagline, regardless of whether color preferences are specified. Use any X colors or r-g-b specifications to designate colors in your preferences file.

Set Editable? to 1 (Yes) to include the tag in the menu. Setting it to 0 (No) or not setting it omits it from the tag menu. The user is able to annotate only with tags that are displayed in the tag menu.

Specify an Accelerator to enable you to choose from the keyboard a new current tag. A keyboard accelerator is a letter, Control-letter, or Meta-letter combination enclosed in angle brackets. For example,<n>, <Control-n>, and <Meta-n> are all valid keyboard accelerator specifications.

Specify an abbreviation for the MenuAbbrev. entry as the seventh item on the line. This allows one to hide some of the markup details from the user, and provide more intuitive entries in the tag pull-down menu.

Click here to view example .awb-prefs files.

NEXT: 6.4 Special Attribute Values

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