# Fully manual NER annotations without tokeniser

**URL:** <https://support.prodi.gy/t/fully-manual-ner-annotations-without-tokeniser/2881>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Tags:** enhancement, ner, done\
**Created:** [May 7, 2020, 2:43pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/fully-manual-ner-annotations-without-tokeniser/2881 "2020-05-07T14:43:47Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![juhai](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c89c15/32.png) [@juhai](https://support.prodi.gy/u/juhai)\
**Post date:** [May 7, 2020, 2:43pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/fully-manual-ner-annotations-without-tokeniser/2881/1 "2020-05-07T14:43:47Z")

</div>

Hello, I am new to Prodigy.

My task is about annotating specific characters on text with categories. I don't want to use Spacy for modelling so I am struggling with the requirement to tokenize the text for ner.manual.

I would like to get annotations with respect to original text rather than the token annotations coming out of ner.manual. I've tried searching for the answer in the forum but failed so far.

Any ideas if what I want is possible?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ines](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/support.prodi.gy/ines/32/3_2.png) [@ines](https://support.prodi.gy/u/ines)\
**Post date:** [May 8, 2020, 7:45pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/fully-manual-ner-annotations-without-tokeniser/2881/2 "2020-05-08T19:45:38Z")

</div>

Hi! Your question is timed well, because v1.10 will actually have a mode for this out-of-the-box that just lets you highlight characters 🙂

In the meantime, you could also achieve something similar by making each character an entry in the `"tokens"` – they're called `"tokens"`, but in reality, they're mostly just a highlightable unit. And then you probably also want to adjust the margin of the `.prodigy-content span` (the chracters) so they're not as spaced.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![juhai](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c89c15/32.png) [@juhai](https://support.prodi.gy/u/juhai)\
**Post date:** [May 11, 2020, 12:12pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/fully-manual-ner-annotations-without-tokeniser/2881/3 "2020-05-11T12:12:25Z")

</div>

Hi Ines. Thanks for the response and I am happy my request has been in the works already. I tried separating by character but didn't know about the span control. I will try that out while you finalise the 1.10 release.  
Cheers!

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ines](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/support.prodi.gy/ines/32/3_2.png) [@ines](https://support.prodi.gy/u/ines)\
**Post date:** [June 17, 2020, 5:45pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/fully-manual-ner-annotations-without-tokeniser/2881/4 "2020-06-17T17:45:09Z")

</div>

Just released Prodigy v1.10, which includes a `--highlight-chars` flag that lets you highlight characters instead. Also [see here](https://prodi.gy/docs/named-entity-recognition#highlight-chars) for details and examples.

> [@rocket Out now: Prodigy v1.10 (plus new video!)](https://support.prodi.gy/t/out-now-prodigy-v1-10-plus-new-video/3030):
>
> Prodigy v1.10 is out now tada And it includes a bunch of cool new features, including dependency and relation annotation, audio and video annotation, an enhanced manual image UI, more settings for NER annotation, including character-based highlighting and a cool example workflow for creating training data for fine-tuning transformer models, new recipe callbacks for validating answers at runtime and for modifying examples before the database, new settings for UI customisation, and lots more! Th…