OTableau

OT tableaux seem to be designed with WYSIWYG editors, such as Word or WordPerfect or OpenOffice in mind. They do not come as natural to those linguists using e.g. LaTeX; it is too easy make a lot of mistakes in where one should put asterisks, etc.

Julien Eychenne, a phonology student who is finishing his PhD thesis in Toulouse right now, has written a small programme which works as a small WYSIWYG editor, just for tableaux: OTableau. Next to generating LaTeX output, the programme also calculates ‘fatal’ violations, and places exclamation marks and shading (if desired) accordingly. It’s a nice little programme.

3 thoughts on “OTableau

  1. Maria

    OTableau looks like a nifty little editor, though LaTeX users who would like an almost WYSIWYG experience do have other options. LyX can format OT tableaux visually (see here for examples), and after some tinkering it lets you do things like dashed lines, which are sort of crucial.

  2. Julien Eychenne

    Thanks to Marc van Oostendorp for posting this news. Since I’ve already received some feedback about OTableau, I uploaded the most up-to-date version I have on my hard drive (source code and windows version).

    If anyone is eager to package a light-weight processor-independent applet for Mac OS X, I’ll be glad to upload it as well. If there are people who want to use OTableau on the Mac and who feel uncomfortable with the command line, please contact me via email (available on my website).

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *