Working with LEAF-Writer
What is LEAF-Writer?
LEAF-Writer is a free, web-based semantic encoding editor. It lets you mark up texts in XML — embedding meaningful tags that identify a document's structure, people, places, dates, and other significant features — without installing proprietary software or learning to code.
Why encode a text at all? Semantic markup turns a document from a flat string of words into structured, machine-readable data. Once encoded, your texts can be formatted, processed, analyzed, visualized, shared, published, and reused — by you, your collaborators, and the wider research community.
LEAF-Writer is available in two forms: LEAF-Writer Commons, a standalone version anyone can use at leaf-writer.leaf-vre.org, and an integrated version within the LEAF virtual research environment (VRE). This documentation focuses on LEAF-Writer Commons.
What can you do with it?
LEAF-Writer combines the rigor of standards-based XML encoding with the accessibility of a word processor-like interface. Key capabilities include:
- Schema-aware editing. LEAF-Writer constrains your tagging options to what your schema allows and continuously validates your document as you work, so your encoding stays well-formed and standards-compliant. Supported schemas include the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and its customizations, as well as the Orlando and CWRC bespoke schemas.
- A readable editing view. Cascading stylesheets (CSS) provide a WYSIWYG view of your document alongside a view showing tags, so you can work with your text rather than around your code.
- Linked Open Data lookups. When you tag a named entity — a person, place, organization, or title — you can look up and attach standard identifiers from authorities such as DBPedia, Geonames, Getty, LGPN, VIAF, and Wikidata. These identifiers connect the same entities across your own documents and make your work interoperable with data produced by others.
- Web Annotation generation. LEAF-Writer can generate Linked Data annotations for tagged entities and for document annotations (dates, notes, citations, corrections, links, keywords), conforming to the Web Annotation Data Model, in XML-RDF or JSON-LD. It can also extract entity references from already-tagged XML to generate Web Annotations.
- Flexible input and output. Open an XML file from your device, from a GitHub repository in the cloud, or by pasting XML directly — or start from a genre-specific template (Letter, Poem, Prose, or Blank). You can also import and auto-transform documents (currently output from the Transkribus HTR engine). When you're done, export in XML, HTML, or Markdown to continue your work elsewhere or publish to a website.
- Cloud collaboration. With a GitHub account, you can open, save, and collaborate on documents stored in GitHub repositories, with automatic background saving.
Next steps
Ready to start encoding? See LEAF-Writer Commons for a guide to opening documents, the editing workspace, markup, and saving your work. For guided, hands-on practice, try the LEAF-Writer Basics Step-by-Step Tutorial or watch the tutorial videos.