Hi. I have a problem with importing praat textgrid files. I made many transcripts with Praat and saved them as “TextGrid”. When I import them into Elan, some of "textgrid files" could do that without any problem, but some couldn’t. The warning says “operation interrupted, no tiers detected in the textgrid file”. I do not understand the difference between them, and do not know how i can fix this. I found a posting (09-09-25 by kitty)  that has similar problem. After read that, i couldnt resolve my problem. I’d be glad if someone gives me the hints.
Strange. Could it be that some TextGrid files use the short notation (not yet supported by ELAN)?
If not, you can send one of the failing files to me (han.sloetjes AT mpi.nl) so that i can test it.
Hi. I have a problem with importing praat textgrid files. I made many transcripts with Praat and saved them as “TextGrid”. When I import them into Elan, some of "textgrid files" could do that without any problem, but some couldn’t. The warning says “operation interrupted, no tiers detected in the textgrid file”. I do not understand the difference between them, and do not know how i can fix this. I found a posting (09-09-25 by kitty)  that has similar problem. After read that, i couldnt resolve my problem. I’d be glad if someone gives me the hints.
many thanks in advance
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 I have experienced this problem - the problem had to do with the encoding for the text grids. The issue at the time was that (some of) the PRAAT text grids were encoded as UTF-16, and that was not the default encoding when you import. Obviously, when ELAN reads in a text grid, if the encoding is wrong, it will think there are no tiers. Check on the encoding parameters when you import. It is a likely source of problems.
Bruce
A useful thing to do is to change your preferences in Praat. I’ve had problems importing even after selecting UTF-16.
If you go to the text writing window in under praat preferences, you can select UTF-8 or UTF-16. My settings had been on “try ASCII then UTF-16”
After I changed this and imported it was quite easy to import.
I’ve had a similar problem when importing Praat textgrid files to ELAN (error message: “no option: not tiers detected”. When changing the encoding to UTF-16, the importing itself worked, i.e. all the tiers appeared in my ELAN file.
BUT: All those annotations made in Praat that consisted of phonetic symbols - e.g.
appeared not in this manner, but the way I had originally had to input them in Praat -e.g. ef for É› -.
Any suggestions how to fix that? Or is my only chance to redo all the phonetic annotations in ELAN itself?
