Colonial Despatches

Dating of maps is inconsistent for maps which have a notBefore and/or notAfter. Check them in the sorted gallery, find oddities, and normalize. Did some today.

Did some auditing of the "Marion's transcriptions" spreadsheet that we're using to keep track of the transcriptions awaiting markup, since PCA has been working on these; checked filenames and made updates and notes where appropriate. Also fixed file naming issue reported by PCA, and did some other housekeeping.

JT provided two new maps for the gallery, so I've added those. I had to refresh myself on the procedure for doing this, so I'll detail it here:

• Extract the bitmaps from the PDFs (if that's the format they come in) using pdfimages -j [pdffile] [outputprefix].
• Create meaningful filenames based on repo, id numbers, and year.
• Copy the full-sized originals into the correct year in [coldesp]/maps] on local drive. These will just be backed up locally.
• Create a quarter-sized "large" image (max width 5000) in maps_lg.
• Create a 1000px-wide version in maps_1000.
• Create a 200px-wide version in maps_200.
• Create a 100px-wide version in maps_thumb.
• Create an XML file with the same name as the image file, and a matching @xml:id. It's simplest to model this on an existing file. Save it in xml/maps.
• Fill out the metadata, and point the facsimile graphic at the right file name, with the right dimensions.
• Add the XML file to SVN and commit it.
• Upload the images to home1t, and the XML file into the db.
• Test to make sure the map shows up in the gallery, and works properly on the site.

I've assigned the first five 1859 documents transcribed by MM to PCA; the 1858 documents are rather complicated, and the existing 1858 documents need some editing, so it's simpler to work on the 1859 documents for the moment. The Google spreadsheet records the status of each document.