The notebook between FieldWorks and your write-up
A notebook whose interlinear examples, entries and text charts are read live from your FLEx project: styled with a click, searched, exported, and never able to change a thing in FLEx.
Why not just FLEx, or just Word?
Because each of them does half of the job. FieldWorks is where the data lives; a document is where the argument lives. Everything below is what happens when the two are in one place.
| You want to… | FLEx alone | Word or a notes app | FLEx Scratchpad |
|---|---|---|---|
| Write around your data: headings, lists, tables, folders, tags, drafts | Notes fields on records; no documents | Yes | Yes: Markdown notes in tabs and folders, with your data inside them |
| Quote an interlinear example that follows your analysis | Only in the Notes field in the text itself, difficult to organize or find later | A pasted copy, stale the moment you re-gloss | Live: read from the project when shown; ↻ after an edit; stays on its lines when you split, merge or delete lines in FLEx |
| Highlight a morpheme, bracket a phrase, colour a word in an example | No | By hand, and lost on every re-paste | A click; kept with the note; carried into every export |
| Gather every example of a construction across your texts | A filter, while the window is open | Copy and paste, one by one | Collections, by hand or by rule (“every line tagged Topic”, “every chart row with kabir in the Subject column”); “Find new lines” later |
| Turn a concordance search into a set of examples | A list of references and a CSV export | Retype or paste each one | Open FLEx’s concordance export: every line it lists becomes a live, numbered example in a collection |
| Work with a text chart in a document | One chart at a time, in its own tool | A screenshot | The live chart or a range of its rows, your own columns beside it, visual filters by column, marker and clause type, three layouts |
| Ask “which column does kabir sit in?” across every chart | No search over charts | — | One search box over every chart of the project, by word, gloss, lexeme, marker, column and clause type; a column profile per lexeme |
| Hear exactly this example | The text's recording, from its player | No | ▶ on each line of a time-aligned text (the timing comes in with a text imported from ELAN or the FlexText Editor suite, or from the FlexText Audio Segmenter: how); clips kept with the notebook; players ride along in the web page and slideshow exports |
| Publish: Word, Excel, PDF, slides, a FLEx text | FLEx's own exports of a text | Word, by hand | Word in LingTeX-Word styles, Excel with one row per chart row, PDF, a slideshow and PowerPoint, and a collection as a .flextext with its examples' audio stitched together. The pretty exports are a work in progress: they improve with every release, and some layouts still need a hand afterwards |
| Read it without the program, in ten years | Needs FieldWorks | Needs Word | Plain Markdown files; every example also saved in them as plain text with a link into FLEx |
| Keep the project safe while you work | Every click edits the real data | Nothing can reach it | Read-only by construction: the program has no way to write to a project, and its tests fail if one appears |
From FLEx to your notes, and back
Everything an example shows comes from your FLEx project as it is now. Edit an analysis in FLEx, click ↻, and the example in your notes follows.
Paste from FLEx
Copy interlinear lines in FLEx (the Gloss or Print view) and paste them into a note. FLEx Scratchpad finds the segment in your project and draws the example: words, morphemes, glosses, categories and the free translation. Or pick a text and its segments, a lexical entry or a text chart from the FLEx object button, or paste a FLEx hyperlink.
Mark it up and write
Click a word to highlight, bold or underline it, a morpheme or a few letters, in any colour. Number your examples, put them in tables, write around them, fold sections away. FLEx's text markup tags show on the examples, styled the way you choose, and a visual filter turns a set of such styles on or off for a note, a folder or the whole notebook, like a highlighting filter in Logos.
Collect, export, hand it on
Gather the examples of a construction into a collection, by hand or by rule, sort them into groups, add a note to each. Export the note as Word, Excel, PDF or a slideshow, or the collection as a FLEx text: one new text of just those examples, with one recording of them all, which you import into FLEx to work on them together (every serial-verb sentence in the corpus as one text, say) without touching the texts they came from, or check in the FlexText Audio Segmenter.
Text charts you can think in
FieldWorks builds constituent charts and then leaves you alone with them: one chart at a time, no notes beside it, no styling by column or marker, and no way to search across charts. Here the chart is a living object in a note.
A chart note, with your own columns
One note is one chart. Add columns FLEx does not have: a choice list shared by the notebook, free notes, or a rule that fills each row from its markers, columns and words (“ShdArg in any column → join this row to the one above”). Values are keyed to the row, so they survive renumbering.
Visual filters
Style a column, a header group, a chart marker, a dependent, speech or song clause, preposed or postposed text, a sentence or paragraph boundary: a tint, a border, brackets, a colour, bold, or hidden. Save a set as a named filter and switch it on for a note, a folder, a tab or the whole notebook. The same filters style the text markup tags on your interlinear examples.
Search every chart in the project
Which column does kabir sit in, and how often? Which rows carry a Topic marker in a speech clause? Type it, or build it from lists, and get the rows from every chart at once, with a profile per column. Insert the rows, or collect them into a collection that finds new rows later.
Three ways to read it
All the columns; the header groups only, with the sub-columns styled inside each cell; or one column per row with the words lined up on a column you choose. Free translations spliced in where you want them, markers on their own line, zoom, frozen columns, and playback that lights the cells of the line being spoken.
Out the door
A chart exports as a Word table on a landscape page, an Excel sheet plus one flat row per chart row to filter and pivot, a PDF, a slide, FieldWorks' own chart XML or JSON; your custom columns and row colours come along. A pivot counts rows by marker and column on the spot. Honestly: the chart exports are the newest part of the program and still rough in places — they get better with each release.
Charts and examples, joined up
An interlinear example can show which chart columns its words sit in, drawn like tags, and a chart can show the text's markup tags in its cells. An entry card tells you which columns the lexeme is found in.
Your FLEx project is never changed
FLEx Scratchpad only reads your project. It cannot change your texts, analyses or lexicon, so you can use it on your real work without risk to it.
Opened for reading only
The program asks FieldWorks for read-only access to the project, every time. It has no way to save a change to a FLEx project, and its own automatic tests fail if that ever changes.
Your notes are kept apart
Everything you write, highlight or collect is saved in your own notebook folder, never in the FLEx project. Delete the notebook and your project is exactly as it was.
Exports are new files
A collection exported as a FLEx text is a new file that you import yourself, as a new text. It cannot touch the texts its examples came from.
Made for the way linguists keep notes
A plain notebook first, so it stays out of your way, with FieldWorks built in where it matters.
Live from your project
Examples, entries and charts are read from FLEx every time they are shown, so they always match your project as it is now; a snapshot keeps them readable when FLEx is closed.
Examples that stay put
Split, merge or delete lines in FLEx and each example keeps showing the lines it was made from, with its highlights on the same words. If a line is gone, the example says so and shows what it last saw, never some other line that now has its number.
Search that knows the language
Search the whole notebook by the vernacular words, glosses and tags of the examples in it, with or without diacritics; list which texts a note, a folder or a selection draws on; filter notes by the text markup tags their examples carry.
Your notes are files
Every note is a Markdown file in an ordinary folder, easy to back up, sync and version, and readable without the program: each example is also saved in it as plain text, with a link that opens it in FLEx. Nothing is ever deleted: removed notes go to the notebook's trash.
Tables of your own
Paradigm tables with merged cells, line breaks in cells and examples inside them, pasted from Excel or Word, styled by row and column, and saved with the note.
Hear the example
When a text is time-aligned, each example plays its own stretch of the recording, lighting each line as it plays. Clips are cut and kept with the notebook, so they still play when the recording is somewhere else. FLEx cannot align a recording itself: the times come in with a text imported from ELAN or the FlexText Editor suite, or from the FlexText Audio Segmenter for a text that is already in FLEx (how).
Word the way linguists set it
Every example exports to Word as a LingTeX-Word interlinear table: tier styles, small-caps grammatical glosses, Word's own example numbering, the free translation in quotes, with the line's FLEx number as a link that opens its text in FLEx. Collapsed examples and chips become links into FLEx. The exports are a work in progress and constantly improving; tell us what comes out wrong.
Attach your files
Drop a recording, a spreadsheet or a PDF into a note: it opens in its own program with a click. Pictures and videos show in the note, and web pages, such as a FlexText listening page, preview right there.
Backed up
To your OneDrive, Google Drive or Dropbox folder, or to S3-compatible storage, encrypted if you like. Old versions are kept, it backs up when you close, and it shows what the space is used for.
Works offline
Everything it needs comes in the download, including the audio tools. It never needs the internet, so it is at home on a field laptop.
Every script
Unicode throughout, right-to-left text laid out right to left, each writing system in its own FLEx font, and search that can ignore diacritics.
Honest about its data
An example says when it is drawn from a snapshot rather than the live project, when its lines moved, and when a recording is missing. The log says what the program asked FLEx and what came back.
Install in a minute
The installer and the zip are the same program, the current release. The installer adds it to the Start menu; the zip runs from wherever you unzip it, a USB stick included.
Installer
- Download FLEx-Scratchpad-Setup and run it. It installs for your user account and needs no administrator rights.
- It isn't signed yet, so Windows may say “Windows protected your PC”: choose More info, then Run anyway.
- Start FLEx Scratchpad from the Start menu, open Settings ⚙ and pick your FLEx project.
A newer Setup upgrades in place and keeps your notebooks. To remove it: Settings › Apps › FLEx Scratchpad › Uninstall; your notebooks stay where they are.
What it needs
- Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit.
- FieldWorks 9 on the same computer, to read a FLEx project. Without it you can still open a
.flextextfile or try the built-in demo. - Microsoft Edge WebView2, which Windows 11 has. The installer tells you if this computer needs it.
If something does not work, run FLEx Scratchpad.exe --selftest report.json in the program's folder and attach the report to an issue.
FLEx Scratchpad 0.1.0 is the first full release. It is in use on real FieldWorks projects, and it will still have rough edges. If something breaks, or a paste from FLEx does not land where it should, please tell us. The user guide describes everything the program does, with pictures.