Install

If you have already Python on your machine

Make sure you have at least Python 3.9.0

Recommended: install JupyterLab: fire up a terminal (= command prompt) and say

pip install jupyterlab

To get text-fabric, you can either fire up a terminal and say:

pip install text-fabric

or fire up a Jupyter Notebook (jupyter lab)

and in a cell say

!pip install text-fabric

Now restart this notebook by clicking the circular arrow in the toolbar:

.

If you do not have Python

The fastest way to set up everything you need to use TF is by installing the JupyterLab Desktop application.

This installs both JupyterLab and Python in one go, as a desktop application running under MacOS, Linux or Windows.

The Jupyter Desktop App can be downloaded from JupyterLab-desktop, choose the one that fits your system.

After downloading, go to your downloads folder and install the application in the way you are used to, but notice the following:

on macos: right-click the .pkg file, answer the dialog box with OK.

on all platforms: install for the current user, not for all users, otherwise you run into problems later on.

macos: click "Change install location" and set it to "Install for me only"

linux: after installation, run the following command from a terminal where username should be changed to your username on the system:

sudo chown -R username:username /opt/JupyterLab

windows: no extra instructions. Two installers will be launched, let them work with the same default location for installation.

Work with TF

In a notebook, put this incantation in a cell and run it:

from tf.app import use

And in a next cell, load the data of some corpus, e.g. annotation/banks.

A = use("annotation/banks")

The first time you do this you will see that the data is being downloaded and prepared for its first use. If you do this a second time, the data is already on your computer in pre-processed form, and TF will see that data and load it quickly.

From here you can use a tutorial.

More extensive tutorials are available for other corpora, see tf.about.corpora.

TF browser

You can also work with TF outside any programming context, just in the browser.

In a terminal, say

tf annotation/banks

Or, in a notebook cell, say

!tf annotation/banks

Wait a few seconds and you see a new window in your browser with an interface to submit queries to the corpus.

Note for Linux users

• On Ubuntu the tf script ends up in your ~/.local/bin directory, but this is not on your PATH.
• You need to execute your .profile file first by:

source ~/.profile

You need to do this every time when you open a new terminal and want to run TF. If you get tired of this, you can add this to your .bashrc file:

PATH="~/.local/bin:${PATH}"
export PATH