GlyphViewer – Introduction

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Welcome Glypher

They say, That a picture is worth a thousand words.

With us, Even the pictures which are thousands of years old, Can tell you their stories.

GlyphViewer improves the online experience of people by helping site owners build complex multilingual content for their published images. A unique feature of the application is that it can recognize and translate Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs.

Have you ever felt frustrated when you did not understand the text in an image?

Imagine that while reading news online an image comes to your attention, an image containing Chinese or Arabic words. To most people the text is actually a hieroglyph and, while a picture can be worth a thousand words, one cannot fully comprehend the message in that image, which can hold wonderful secrets. This is where GlyphViewer application can help by allowing site owners to translate and export the text in the images in a friendly format optimized for search engines such as Bing or Google. Not only the image will now provide a native language description to the user, but search engines will associate the image with the translated content in each language.

GlyphViewer also allows non-technical people to build complex multilingual advertise slogans starting from campaign’s images. Serve native language slogans to people all around the world, link regions in your image to where users need to be directed. Thus, the targeted person will fully understand what the campaign is about without any additional language knowledge, besides the mother’s tongue.

GlyphViewer will help you decipher both Modern and Ancient text!

Have you ever been to Egypt and wanted to unlock the secrets of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs?

GlyphViewer is the first application in the world that is able to recognize and translate Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Imagine being present in a temple at Luxor or Karnak and the first thing that you notice, apart from the actual size of the complex which overwhelms, is the amount of hieroglyph writing on the walls, cartouches and so on. Any decent tourist starts taking picture after picture, but at one point one just wants to know what the writing actually mean. This is what GlyphViewer can do, recognize and translate Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs in your images. To a certain degree GlyphViewer is a modern version of the Rosetta Stone, as it does the same thing the stone slab did for unlocking the hieroglyphic language. The difference is that now the stone is a piece of software that is built with the help of GlyphViewer application to be shared online.

One may also export and publish the translated content and this makes GlyphViewer a useful tool for Museums that want to share with the visitors the secrets of their ancient exhibits.

You can create your own account, upload images and translations to www.2glyph.com site, use GlyphViewer desktop application to add images, build texts, translate and much more. Check the child pages for information on how you can use the application.

GlyphViewer

GlyphViewer is a desktop application that you can download from www.2glyph.com site. We currently offer support for Windows/MacOSX/Linux operating systems.

GlyphViewer is licensed on a per user model, this means that after purchase you may use it on your favorite platform.

Though some of the features requires you to purchase the application, many items are actually free. All you need to do is to create an account at www.2glyph.com and try it out.

The application enables you to create projects, add images to the projects, identify text from images (using optical character recognition software) as well as to create translations from the received text. Use the translated text to build SEO friendly images to deploy on your favorite site.

You may use GlyphViewer to recognize and translate both Modern languages, such as European languages (English, French, German, etc), Asian (Chinese, Japanese), African (Hebrew, Arabic), and Ancient ones as Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyph (named HieroGlyph) and Ancient Greek.

Let’s take a short walk through the features and functionality of the application:

1. Glyph Dialog Buttons

Notice the upper right buttons designed especially for touch devices. Each of those button (enable by pressing left mouse button) will display a dialog that you may use to edit you image by recognizing text, selecting image zones and many more. Currently there are 4 types of dialogs to be displayed:

Glypher Login dialog that you must use to login in the system
Language dialog that you can use to recognize and translate text from images
Translation dialog that you will use to add or edit translations
Glyph Builder dialog to modify add found glyphs

If the dialog area takes to much of your view size, you may close it by clicking on the green arrow to the left. Open it again by clicking on the upper right red arrow that will appear.

2. Dialog Area

This is where form dialogs appear after you either press the button areas on the button view on choose a menu action. You will have to use the functionality in these dialogs to accomplish different actions described in the child pages of the documentation.

You can have more than one form opened, but no more than it is visible possible. If you try to open a dialog while the whole visible area is used, another dialog will close and the new one wii be opened.

The login form functionality is described in 1. Becoming a glypher, while the other 3 dialogs are mainly used with 3. Building translations.

3. Welcome Page

When the application is first started a welcome page is displayed in the page tab bar. At this point you are not logged in the system and a welcome message will be shown for this. In this page you have 3 options:

Glypher View

You can choose to open either a Recent Project, by clicking on the project’s name or path. If you already opened a project you can use the Recent Images section to open that specific image in the upper tab bar. Use Current Project Images to open an image belonging to the project that you manually closed (but did not remove from the project) using the tab bar close button.

Additionally use the Open Project… or New Project… buttons for the same functionality that you can find in the Project menu, or send us a Feedback of your experience with the application.

We will always review your comments!. You may also use the Feedback option to ask for additional features.

News Support

A new web page will appear that will show you the latest changes in the application, new features added that you might use and much more. It will also be linked with the developer’s blog, should you be interested. Think of it as an RSS feed.

Getting started

Clicking on this tab will open in the Welcome Page this tutorial. You can then browse it to learn how to use the application.

4. GlyphViewer Get Started Wizard

If you are a new user you might want to use the Get Started Wizard on the Glypher View part of the Welcome page. Use the option to login, create a new project or add an image. Just quick links, nothing more.

5. Tabs and menu options

The upper part of the application contains the tab bar. Here images or web pages will be shown in a different tab. You can click on a tab to actually view the image or web page. At this moment you only have opened the Welcome tab, with the data described in Welcome Page chapter.

At any point you can close a tab (except the Welcome tab). (Note*: closing an image tab will not delete the image from the project. You can still open it using Current Project Images in the Welcome Page. Use Remove Image from the Project menu to actually delete an image).

Let’s take a look at the menu options that come with GlyphViewer application:

Project

New Project will open a dialog to create a new glypher project that you can add images to. Please select an accesible location where user has read/write rights.
Open Project will open a dialog to search for a GlyphViewer project, *.gvp, that will be loaded. (Note*: you can only have one project opened at a time, so any previous project will be closed).
Save Project once a project has been opened this will become enabled so you can save the images and translations added to your project. Each time you exit the application you will be asked to save the current project.
Close Project will close the current project. You will also be asked if you would like to save the project. It’s always a good idea to do so.

The menu functions are very well explained in 2. Working with projects.

Image

Add Image when you have opened a project this will allow to add an image to the project. Even when building translation we will never change the original image, just add separate data to it saved in the project. You can add images from your local hard drive(s).
Remove Image will remove the current opened tab image from your project. Remember that removing an image will delete all data associated with your image (translations, word results etc..). The original image will not be deleted from your hard drive,
Glyphs display will show found glyphs on the image, or hide them.
Words display will show translated words in the image, or hide them.
Translations display the same with the built translations.

Publish

Export As Image… for the current opened image tab you will be able to export the view as an image type of your choosing (png, jpg, tiff …). You will be able to select if glyphs, words or translations will be shown on the static exported image.
Export As HTML… also for the current opened image tab you will be able to build a HTML document that will wrap the original image and contain areas for the glyphs, words, translations. You will also be able to choose which of them you would like to export. Also the html document will have javascript effects, such as the one when you will hover your mouse over a glyph area.

The export functionality is explained in 3. Building translations.

Translation Builder

Recognize Text will open the Language dialog so that you can use Recognize feature to select an area in the image, a language you think the text is in and to pass the selected area through an OCR engine to build a translation in that language,
BuildTranslations will open the Translation dialog required for creating or editing translations that you can add to the image.
Identify Ancient Hieroglyphs will open the Language dialog and the Glyph Builder dialog on the right as you need them both to add ancient glyphs to image (either through OCR or manual editing), and to try to automatically translate them using GlyphViewer’s machine translation technology,

The menu options are just quick links to open dialog forms on the right that you will need to either log in to the system, 1. Becoming a glypher, or to create translation data as described in 3. Building translations.

Online Translators

Google Translate will open a new tab that will get you to Google’s online machine translation technology.
Microsoft Bing will open the same online feature, in this case from Microsoft. It used to be the former Yahoo! Babel Fish.

Even though GlyphViewer and www.2glyph.com are about building quality translations from images that you can publish around the web, you might want to check your translations against this engines. Just hover over a translation and notice the Bing or Google buttons on top. Clicking them will open a new page to the online translators using the current text to be translated. You can also do this from the Translation Edit Dialog.

Help

About GlyphViewer will open a dialog with information about the current version of the application as well as the version of the loaded plugins. GlyphViewer language support is added through installing of different plugins so here you can check your language support through the successful loaded plugins.
Account Settings will open a dialog with the current settings of your account. Use this to add default settings to be used in Export HTML dialog.
Software update will open a new install type dialog that you can use to update/remove components from you application. You will need to run this from time to time to keep the application up to date. Also as new language support becomes available (check the News Support page). you will have to use this tool to install additional plugins to the system that will add new features to the application.

6. Search help

One may use the upper right textfield to search this tutorial for any information that you may need. Just enter the desired words (such as building a translation) and click on the right search icon that appears in the textbox while typing. A new web page will be opened in a tab showing the result of the search.