Installation

Download

The easiest way of getting set up is to download a Jar file that contains all the necessary java classes to get you started. Throughout this documentation, we will refer to this Jar file as <alto>.jar. In reality, it might be called e.g. alto-2.0.jar.

Alto requires a current (1.8) version of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

Using the graphical user interface

Once you have downloaded <alto>.jar, see if you can start it:

java -jar <alto>.jar

This should bring up the graphical user interface, which is described in more detail here.

Compile from Source

Instead of downloading the Jar, you can also compile Alto from source. You need a Git client and have the Java Development Kit installed (version 8 or greater).

First, clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/coli-saar/alto

This creates a folder alto under your current working directory. Change to that folder and build Alto:

./gradlew build

You will find the results in build/libs/alto-<version>.jar (for just the Alto classes themselves) and target/alto-<version>-all.jar (for a "fat jar" that contains the Alto classes together with all libraries on which Alto depends). You can use target/alto-<version>-all.jar wherever we say <alto>.jar below; for instance, you can do

java -jar target/alto-<version>-all.jar