Welcome to CritWriter!

You just came from a form that was presented after you selected the "comment" button in a page viewed through the CritLink Mediator. That button activates CritWriter, a tool to help you create annotations quickly.

There are three things you need to do in order to make an annotation. You need to (a) write the annotation, (b) specify the phrase you're commenting on, and (c) publish the annotation.

Entering the annotation

At the top of the form you can enter your name and e-mail address, which will be used in the newly created annotation document. Your e-mail address is also used to assign you a separate directory, so that can name your annotation files freely, and used for sending you notification messages if you request them.

Following that, you enter a title and the body of the annotation. For the body, you have the option of typing in either HTML syntax (just enter the portion that goes in the <BODY> element) or enhanced text. If you use the latter (which is the default), you can type in plain text but your text is automatically formatted according to these rules:

  1. blank lines become paragraph breaks
  2. paragraphs starting with a "+" become list items
  3. words in *asterisks* become emphasized
  4. words in pairs of **asterisks** become bold
  5. URLs and e-mail addresses become hyperlinked
  6. lines starting with spaces become preformatted

You also need to select a "link type" to indicate your annotation's relationship to the target document. The current choices are "support", "issue", "query", and "comment".

The "monitor" checkbox asks CritLink to send you notification in e-mail every time it discovers new links that point to your annotation (that is, responses to your note). It is equivalent to the "monitor" button in the CritLink header box.

Choosing the target phrase

You can either link your annotation to the entire target document, in which case it will appear in the table of links at the end, or to a specific phrase in the document.

To link to a specific phrase, simply select the words of the phrase from the document and paste them into the "target phrase" field. You should copy and paste words exactly as they appear in the target document without pasting any partial words.

Sometimes the word or phrase you want to annotate might appear several times in the document. Since the mediator positions annotation markers by searching the document for your words, you might need to include some more context to make sure the annotation appears on the right occurrence. You can do this by selecting a longer phrase, which must include the target phrase, and pasting that into the "context phrase" field of the form.

Publishing your annotation

Finally, you can choose to either publish or download the result. Each of the following options may or may not be available to you:

Publish to the public area of the CritWriter server.
If you don't have an account on the machine running this annotator, you can still publish your document into a general area. However, you won't be able to edit it and the server administrator might remove your document at any time to free up disk space.
Publish to your private area on the CritWriter server.
If you have an account on the machine running this annotator, you can publish your document in your personal Web space there.
Download the result.
If you have your own website, you can download the annotation document and then put it up on the Web yourself. If you use this option, be sure to fetch your document through the mediator once the document is on the Web and has a URL. Only then can the mediator update its knowledge of links from your annotation.

For publishing on the server, you can specify a filename to store the annotation under. The annotation is stored in a directory just for you (based on your e-mail address or username), so you don't need to worry about what filenames are used by other people. You can use slashes to specify subdirectories to be created in which the annotation will be stored. You can also leave the filename field alone so it says "[default filename]", in which case CritWriter will generate a filename from the title you supplied.


by Ka-Ping Yee, 6 December 1998