@Font header missing

[Brian Verdine]

Hi everyone,

I'm a newbie to CLAN and I am trying to use it for an existing project we had been transcribing the caveman way in MS Excel.  I wrote a VBA script to pull various pieces of the necessary data and transcripts into a .txt file and then changed that into a .cha file.  I then opened them in CLAN and used various parts of the CLAN functionality to clean up the remaining issues.  Everything seems to be fine except that when I run a check for every file it says "@Font:" is missing at the beginning of the file.(69)"  I figured out that the font header is a "hidden header" before @Begin, but none of the online manuals or chibolts topics seemed to tell me what the header would need to say or give me a list of options I could try out.  I can easily add that header with my VBA code, but I need to know exactly what the header line needs to say.  Alternatively, I wasn't sure if there might be a CHAT command I could run on the batch of files to specify the font for all the files?  Any help would be greatly appreciated!  If it matters I'm using the Windows version in Windows 10.

Best,

Brian

[Brian Verdine]

To follow up a little bit, I changed some of the transcriptions on the CHILDES site into .txt format.  That allowed me to see the hidden headers and they all had "@UTF8 @PID:   11312/c-00012165-1" at the beginning (though no @Font: line).  I decided to try appending these to the beginning of my files and that fixed the "@Font:" is missing at the beginning of the file.(69)" warning.  

However, I am still not sure if there are implications for these lines that I might not be aware of or if there might be a reason for specifying something else?

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Brian,

    In fact the @Font tier is not required, so I am surprised about the error message you are reporting.  Are you using a current version of CLAN.  If so, please send me the file causing you the trouble and I will take a look. 

   

— Brian MacWhinney

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[Brian Verdine]

Hi Brian- In trying to respond to your post I figured out part of what is going on and have been troubleshooting a bit.  When I tried to scrub out some comments from a transcription because of the sensitivity of some of that information I realized it stopped giving me the warning. 

Basically, if I open a file in CLAN that is giving me the warning and I edit it manually and save the edits through CLAN, the saved file will not produce the font warning even though I did nothing to the headers.  This then allows the program to go through the full check procedure ("CLAN Deletion" attached file).  If I change the file extension instead to .txt and edit the same information out using a text editor, then change the file back to a .cha file, the file produces the font warning on a check ("Text Editor Deletion" attached file).  All of the edits I've done to the files to this point have been through the command box without opening/saving individual files, so that editing seems to be akin to what is happening when I edit using a text editor.  That is, the files continue to trip the header warning no matter how many changes I make with the command box.

As I said, adding the "@UTF8 @PID:   11312/c-00012165-1" line in before I imported fixed up the problem and allowed CHECK to run through on all the files without needing to open/save individual files.  But again, I don't know what implications these headers have.

I'm obviously not familiar with your code, but my guess is that upon a manual save from inside the program some kind of information or formatting change is saved into the .cha file about the Font by default, which is not happening when I edit in a text editor OR run things from the command box.  This is probably not a problem that has been encountered before because I doubt very many people are importing the way that I am and batch editing to the extent I am (we have approximately 120 transcriptions to import from a project where transcription is already completed in lab-designed Excel worksheets).  I should add that the .cha files I'm creating to start with are just a straight conversion of a .txt file.  I did not use any of CLANs import functions.  I wrote a VBA script to create a text file from the patched together information in our Excel sheets and I simply tell Excel to save it with a .cha extension.