Follow this link for some views of an ASDEditor window as it appears to a user.  Yellow nodes are initial  nodes -- nodes at which subphrases can begin.  White nodes are non-initial nodes.  Final nodes -- ones at which subphrases end -- have phrase types written in blue to the right of them.  Grey nodes and edges with a black spot in their center "handles" are ones which have been selected by the user of the editor.  An edge leaves from the right side of a node and enters the left side of a node.  However in some cases (such as the edge leaving the node and 1) they appear to come from or go to another part of the node box, because the box is drawn over the edge.  An edge that connects a node to itself has its "handle" appearing above the node by default, as in the example of the edge that connects the node PREPPHRASE 1 to itself.

Depending on whether or not the file asddigraphs.jar has been added to your system's CLASSPATH, you can run the ASDEditor from a command window with the command
   java asd/ASDEditor
or
   java -cp asddigraphs.jar asd/ASDEditor
In the latter case, the file asddigraphs.jar must be in the subdirectory from which you are issuing the command.

The ASDEditor allows you to do such things as

• open an existing ASD grammar file for editing, or create a new empty ASD grammar
• merge another ASD grammar file into the grammar that is currently open for editing, to create a combination of the two grammars.  This operation renumbers instances of the grammar being merged in, to avoid duplicate instance numbers
• display the grammar, or portions of it, in graphical form as a network (digraph) of nodes and edges
• print the currently displayed portion of the grammar network.  Landscape orientation of the page is recommended.
• add new words and phrase-type names to the vocabulary of the grammar
• add new instances of words and phrase types to the grammar
• create new edges that link word and phrase type instances together
• add semantic action and semantic value "augmentations" to nodes in a grammar (See cardinal.grm and Numerals.java for examples of how those can be used.)
• delete edges and instances (nodes) from the grammar
• delete words from the vocabulary
• save the grammar to a file
• revert to the most recently saved version of the grammar file for the grammar currently being edited.  This can be used as an "undo" mechanism, provided you save to the grammar file frequently.
• change (toggle) the background color of grammar diagrams between green and white

When you select a word and one of its instances in the upper left (or upper right) two panes, the corresponding node and all nodes connected to it are displayed in the bottom pane, if they are not displayed there already.

When you select a node in the bottom pane, if you hold the Control key down while you make the selection, the choice of whether the node will be selected as a left node versus a right node, as indicated by the buttons above the bottom pane, will be changed before the node selection is made.  This makes it easier to change between the left and right lists, without having to press one of the buttons above the bottom pane.

When you select an edge in the bottom pane, by clicking on its circular "handle" in the center of the edge, the selections in the panes at the top are updated correspondingly.

A node or edge handle in the bottom pane can be moved by first selecting it (by clicking on it and releasing the click) and then dragging it to the desired new position.

When you drag nodes displayed in the bottom pane of the ASDEditor window, notice that dragging with the shift key down has a different effect than dragging without the shift key down, when a node is linked by edges to other nodes.  Specifically, dragging with the shift key pressed causes all of the nodes and edges in a connected component of the digraph to move together.

last revision: 2015 Mar 27