Add toggle to show unannotated clean text view in annotation editor

[shreeya1810]

Summary

Add a toggle button in the annotation editor toolbar that shows/hides a panel with the plain document text — no annotation highlights or colored spans.

Use Case

In densely annotated biomedical documents, the visual complexity of overlapping highlighted spans can make it hard to read the document. Annotators need to read the plain abstract to understand full context before or during annotation, without the distraction of existing markup.

Proposed Solution

• Toggle button next to document title in toolbar
• Shows/hides a panel above the annotation editor with raw document text
• State persisted in AnnotationPreference.cleanTextMode
• Styled for readability (serif font, justified, comfortable line height)
• Updates via AJAX without full page reload

[reckart]

You can open the annotation layer sidebar and temporarily hide all layer there. What additional benefit would your proposed feature bring?

[shreeya1810]

Thanks for pointing that out! You're right that hiding all layers via the annotation layer sidebar achieves a similar result.

Our specific need was slightly different — we wanted to view the clean text side-by-side with the annotated view simultaneously, not as a replacement. In our biomedical annotation workflow, documents are densely annotated with multiple overlapping entity and relation layers. Annotators found it helpful to have the plain text visible as a persistent reference above the annotation editor while actively working below, without having to toggle layers on and off each time.
We fully recognise this is a niche use case. That said, after multiple annotation rounds our annotators repeatedly and independently requested this feature, and reported it meaningfully helped them.

[reckart]

It would seem to me to look pretty crowded on screen.
Can you provide a screenshot of what this looks like?

[shreeya1810]

[reckart]

Scanning quickly over your PR, it seems you have implemented this feature in Java/Wicket - any probably applying to all annotation editors (e.g. brat, but also PDF, HTML, etc.). IMHO such a feature would only make sense in brat. That would IMHO mean, such a feature should be implemented as part of the brat annotation editor TypeScript code.

I believe other editors which stick more closely to the original text layout (e.g. HTML/PDF) would not benefit from showing a separate "clean" version of the text.

[shreeya1810]

You're right — I implemented this in the base annotation page which applies to all editors including PDF and HTML, which already present the text in a cleaner layout. The use case really only makes sense for the brat editor where annotation markup can make the text harder to read.

If this is seen as a worthwhile addition, I'd be happy to reimplement it as part of the brat code so it only applies where it's actually useful. Please let me know if that's worth pursuing.