Chatter

Chatter is a cross-platform application that performs strict validation of CHAT transcripts and also can convert CHAT to XML conforming to our XML schema. It is written in pure Java except for a system-dependent portion that calls the CLAN editor.

Downloads

Choose from the following:

• MacOS application.
• Platform-independent JAR.

  This is suitable for Windows, Linux, and all other platforms that support Java.

  WARNING for Windows users: Internet Explorer has a bug that results in its trying to download a JAR file into a ZIP file, renaming chatter.jar to chatter.zip. There are two solutions to this problem:

  • Use a different browser, such as Firefox.
  • If using Internet Explorer as your browser, please make sure to save the file as chatter.jar. To do so, change the "Save as type" to "All Files", and edit the "File name" to remove the ".zip" that Internet Explorer substituted for ".jar", and type back in the correct ".jar" extension.

    If the file name displays as "chatter" instead of "chatter.zip", because you have "hide file extensions" turned on, then it is more difficult to rename the file. You have to unhide the file extensions first. First, open up "My Computer" and navigate to the directory where you saved the jarfile. Once you're in that folder, go to the "Tools" menu and click "Folder Types". On the "View" tab, turn the option "Hide extensions for known file types" OFF. Click "Apply". Now you can edit the filename extension and change it from ".zip" to ".jar".

System requirements

Chatter will run on any platform with Java 5 (or higher) installed.

Usage

In GUI mode, Chatter operates by taking a folder and processing all the CHAT files inside the folder, recursively through any subfolders. (The Macintosh application allows drag and drop of a folder to the Chatter application icon.)

The folder, call it chatfolder, is transformed to a parallel folder of XML files, chatfolder-xml.

If there are any CHAT validation errors, each one is listed in the GUI window. Double-clicking on an error line will launch CLAN (in the case of Macintosh and Windows) to load the CHAT file and highlight the line at which the error was detected.

A file 00errors.cex will also be left in any subfolders in which errors were detected.

The Redo button allows a convenient validate-edit cycle.

Current version

The current version is 1.0-alpha-119, of December 5, 2012.

The change log.