When you start JGloss for the first time, the welcome wizard is shown. This dialog will guide you to the steps required to import your first Japanese text. After you have completed the wizard, the annotated text will be shown in the document window.

Figure 3.1. JGloss Document Window

Figure 3.1, “JGloss Document Window” shows the JGloss window after some text is imported. The top-left part of the window shows the annotated document. An annotated word is shown in light red, with the reading annotation above and the translation annotation below the word. The top-right part of the window shows the list of annotations.

The bottom-left part of the window contains the annotation editor. For the selected annotation the annotation editor shows the current reading and translation, and dictionary form of the entry. You can use the annotation editor to change the reading and translation of a word by editing the text in the text fields.

The bottom-right part shows dictionary search results for the currently selected text. If you select an annotation, the annotated word is automatically searched. Click on a result to use it as the new reading or translation. If you select some unannotated text in the top-left document view, it will also be automatically searched. Click on the Annotate selection... button to add an annotation for the selected text.

The heuristics used for generating the annotations are not perfect. For example, if you import a text using the EDICT2 dictionary file, 来る is assigned the reading きたる instead of くる and 一人 is assigned the reading いちにん instead of the more common ひとり. This happens because the application picks the first reading and translation found in the dictionary. Also, the algorithm used for verb/adjective deinflection can produce false results. What follows is that you should not always trust the automatic annotations, the document will require some editing to be correct.

When you have finished editing your document, you can export it to different formats. Select HTML from the Export entry in the File menu. In the file chooser you can select which type of annotations will be written. Select a file name and save the HTML file. If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer which already (more or less) supports the Ruby Annotation XHTML specification, the ruby will be rendered above the annotated word by the browser. Translations will be shown in a popup window if you move the mouse over a word.