What is annotation?
Annotation is also known as coding, and it refers to a common approach where extra information is added to the text. For Transcribear, this is achieved by inserting a tag in the form of pointed brackets <>, and this process is sometimes also called tagging.
Annotation Scheme
You can develop your own annotation scheme or use the existing one on Transcribear. For example, you may want to anonymize a name mentioned in an interview, so you can use a pseudonym like John and add <anm> after the name to indicate that this is a pseudonym. It will look like this: John <anm>.
Transcribear also allows you to add a pair of tags to indicate the beginning and ending of a string of text. For anonymization purposes, it will look like this: <anm>John Doe</anm>. The opening tag is the same as a stand-alone tag <anm>, and the closing tag incudes a back slash / in the tag </anm>.
Hotkeys
On Transcribear, hotkeys include Esc and F1 to F12 on the first row of your keyboard. They provide shortcuts for various commands. The hotkeys F6 to F12 are reserved for annotation while F1 to F5 are used for adding timestamps, or the functionality of a media player like rewind <<, fast forward >>.
It means you just need to press a hotkey on the keyboard to execute a command. For example, if you press F5, then a timestamp will be inserted in the text when you are playing an audio or video recording. For annotation, if you press F6, then the tag pair <anm></anm> will be added automatically without you having to type the whole tag one key after another.
You can see the legends of those hotkeys on the top panel.