Description

Nmerge is a commandline tool written in JAVA that manipulates Multi-Version Documents or MVDs. An MVD is a representation of multiple versions of one text as a series of interleaved textual fragments. It is designed to efficiently represent overlapping structures. The versions contained in an MVD can be in any format and are unlimited in number. MVDs are useful for storing cultural heritage texts that exist in multiple versions or multiple markup perspectives as used in corpus linguistics. The technology is described in Schmidt, D. and Colomb, R., 2009. A data structure for representing multi-version texts online, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 67.6, 497-514. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2009.02.001 and in Merging Multi-Version Texts: a General Solution to the Overlap Problem http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol3/html/Schmidt01/BalisageVol3-Schmidt01.html. It is also described on my blog at http://multiversiondocs.blogspot.com.

Nmerge can be used as a library in a JAVA application or as a commandline tool with 16 commands:

1. It can ADD a version to an MVD.
2. It can ARCHIVE an MVD as a folder of original files and a small XML guide file.
3. It can COMPARE two versions in an MVD and show the insertions, deletions, substitutions and transpositions between them.
4. It can CREATE an empty MVD.
5. It can DELETE a version from the MVD.
6. It can compute the VARIANTS of a range of text in a version
7. It can change or read the DESCRIPTION string for the MVD.
8. It can EXPORT an MVD to XML (by escaping the content if it is also XML).
9. It can FIND text in one version or across all versions in an MVD.
10. It can print HELP for any one of these commands.
11. It can IMPORT a previously exported or carefully written XML file into an MVD.
12. It can LIST the versions and groups of versions within an MVD.
13. It can READ a single version in an MVD.
14. It can UNARCHIVE a set of versions and its guide XML file and build an MVD in one step.
15. It can UPDATE a version in an MVD with new text for that version.
16. It can print a USAGE statement for the tool.