Introducing Nammu, Oracc's new ATF editor

Nammu is Oracc's new, platform-independent editing software for creating transliterations, lemmatisations and translations of cuneiform texts. It is being written for us by Raquel Alegre and Jens Nielsen of UCL's Research Software Development Team.

• Download the current release of Nammu
• Follow these installation instructions

If you are an existing Oracc content-creator and have been editing ATF in Emacs, that's all you need to do. You'll find that Nammu is an intuitive replacement for Emacs, and that you can use all the Oracc keyboard shortcuts as usual.

New to ATF?

If you haven't edited ATF before, you may also want to download:

• our keyboard for cuneiform transliteration
• and/or one or more unicode transliteration fonts

You should also read the online help pages on learning and using Oracc ATF and on lemmatising.
Do contact any one of the Oracc Steering Group (Eleanor, Jamie, Niek, or Steve) if you would like to have your own Oracc project space (which can be public or private, as you like).

Tips and tricks

Nammu now has all its core funcationality – you can edit real texts with it unproblematically -- but it is still under development. If you like you can join the oracc/nammu group on Github to:

• watch for new releases
• see which aspects of Nammu are currently being worked on, and
• most helpfully for us, report bugs and issues.

Here are some ease-of-use features that we're currently working to enhance:

• At the moment there is no line-wrapping, so you have to scroll across for long lines.
• Nor is there any search/replace facility yet — also coming soon, we hope.
• There's no split screen option yet, either, so for the moment I suggest that you create translations in your usual word processor as you lemmatise, then paste them into Nammu for validation when you finish. It works for me!

For more details see here.

More about Nammu

Nammu has some built-in help but you can also:

• watch a video of me using Nammu to edit a tablet from Tell Khaiber
• watch the whole video, in which I introduce Oracc and Tell Khaiber
• read Raquel's slides about the programming and principles behind Nammu
• ask any one of the Oracc Steering Group (Eleanor, Jamie, Niek, or Steve) for further help!