Starting and shutting down the UI

Make sure that you've started the Web server.

Starting the UI

Configure your Firefox browser as follows:

• Ensure that popups are not blocked for localhost (you can check this in the Firefox preferences window under the Content tab).
• In the Firefox preferences window in the General tab, ensure that "Always ask me where to save files" is selected.

Both of these are extremely important. Popups must be unblocked in order to view errors and other notifications in the UI, and the file save dialog allows you to modify the names of the annotated files you save.

Once the Web server is started and Firefox is configured, you can navigate to http://localhost:7801/MAT/workbench to start up the UI.

The initial screen

The initial UI screen displays a greeting, and is then blank except for the top menubar and the three major panes:

The region on the left, directly below the menubar, is the container for a tabbed display of your open documents and workspaces. The region on the right, directly below the menubar, is the container for task information: the tags that are available in your current document, the workflow that you're following (in file mode) or the folder you're in (in workspace mode). The region at the bottom is a container for auxiliary information, such as tables of annotations, that may be available in some of the document viewing or editing modes.

These regions are resizeable; at least in some browsers, there will be a handle in the middle of the line separating the regions (as you can see above).

The menubar has seven elements:

• "MAT" - a decorative label, which does nothing. If your task has been appropriately customized, this may be the short name of the task instead.
• "File" - the file menu, where you can open documents or save documents, or open workspaces
• "Tabs" - the tabbing menu, where you'll be able to show and hide various tabs in the upper left tabbed display.
• "View" - a menu for controlling aspects of the document view. This menu is enabled only when a document is active.
  
• "Reconciliation" - a menu for controlling aspects of document reconciliation. This menu is enabled only when the active document is a reconciliation document.
  
• "Help" - access the MAT documentation in a separate window or tab, or show the MAT version.
• "Logging" - a button to activate or deactivate UI logging

We'll provide more detail about these elements as we proceed.

Shutting down the UI

Since the UI is just a browser page, simply close the page, or your browser.

If there are any unsaved documents, or if logging is currently enabled and there's logging data available, the UI will try to ensure that you have the chance to save them. This behavior differs from browser to browser (and from OS to OS), and is fairly limited in the amount of control available over the closing process. But you'll likely get a prompt like this:

Once you acknowledge this, you'll get another, somewhat more helpful, dialog:

If you select "Stay on Page", you'll now have the option of saving the unsaved elements.

If you're editing documents in a workspace, and you choose not to save them, the UI will attempt to ensure that the document locks are released when it closes. This operation is unreliable, so MAT always allows you to open any document that has been locked by you.