So since before writing this, one questions I’ve gotten a number of times is why tone groups are just called 1, 2, and 3, etc. This was somewhat intentional, as I think it is healthy (both for the computer tool, and for the linguist) to remain agnostic of the value of sortings, until “same/different” piles are established. But while I stand by that statement at least initially, I recognize that most people are ultimately going to want to give even surface groupings some kind of descriptive names, and it would be nice for this tool to handle that.

So I decided to give myself a gift and implement this feature, and this is what I came up with:

The verify surface tone group page now has a “rename group” menu in the upper left, which when clicked on, provides the following very simple entry window:

I’ve given my position on how these labels should go, but you can of course call it ‘H’, ‘High’, or ‘Rocky Mountain High’, as you like. Analytically, though, I hope you get that giving any label at this point that implies an underlying form value would be inappropriate, as we are sorting on surface form here.

This name is then picked up in the tone report, providing more interesting results:

In fortunately, I haven’t figured out how to display fonts with graphite features (yet, anyone?), but fortunately these are just standard unicode points, so the text file output can be given a nicer font specification when viewed in LibreOffice, as usual:

And of course, wherever else you import this text, will be able to handle graphite font features, right? :-)