New in 5.0:
- Corrected many bugs.
- Display font sizes in points rather than pixels.
New in 4.6.41 (December 9, 2007):
- Windows: corrected a bug that could cause listening experiments not to run when the directory path included non-ASCII characters; the same bug could (under comparable circumstances) cause scripted menu commands not to work.
- Corrected a bug that could cause null bytes in data files when the text output encoding preference was try ISO Latin-1, then UTF-16.
Dear Praat users,
you can now download Praat version 5.0 from www.praat.org.
The first thing you will see when starting Praat is that the Picture window is larger than before. Since 1992, typical screen resolutions have risen from 72 to 100 pixels per inch, and Praat is now one of the programs that takes this into account. The distance between numbers in the Picture window should now be approximately one inch again. Also, a 12-point font should now have an approximate size of 12 points again (rather than 12 screen pixels); you will see that the texts in the sound window are easier to read than before. The size of pictures and fonts on the clipboard and in EPS files has not changed; this was always correct.
The reason for the update of the major version to “5” is the beginning of Unicode support. All of Praat has been internally rewritten in a way that allows Praat to handle the characters of all the world’s writing systems. The first benefit of this is the ability (on Mac and Windows) to use letter symbols for Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Croatian, and Hebrew. See Special symbols for details. You can use these writing systems in TextGrids, in listening experiments, in Tables, in scripts, in file names, and elsewhere. In Praat 5.1 we plan to also support Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean text (also on Linux).
Unicode support comes with the need for using text files that can contain non-ASCII characters. If a text file that you want Praat to produce is going to contain such characters, Praat will write that text file in the UTF-16 format, which is a worldwide standard for writing Unicode text files. Many other programs (such as NotePad and Microsoft Word) understand such text files; if you have troubles importing Praat-produced text files in programs that do not yet understand UTF-16 (such as SPSS), then consult the Unicode manual page, because such troubles are easy to solve.
Unicode support requires you to install the Charis SIL and/or Doulos SIL Unicode fonts if you need phonetic symbols. You can download these fonts from the Praat download pages for Mac and Windows.
A major change that will make your life easier is the new Draw commands in the Sound and TextGrid windows. With these commands you can draw the visible part of the waveform or spectrogram or pitch curve or formants directly to the Picture window, from where you can copy them to your word processor or save them to a picture file. It is thus no longer necessary to first Extract these things to the Objects window.
Other improvements:
Audio files: Erez Volk contributed the writing of FLAC files and the reading of MP3 files.
Statistics: more extensive logistic regression.
OT learning: leaky constraint weights, constraint-specific plasticities, positive constraint satisfactions, positive Harmonic Grammar.
Graphics: better rotated text in clipboards. Because of this, Praat 5.0 no longer runs on Windows 95 and 98.
Best wishes,
Paul