Image Markup Tool blog

Submitters requested some detail to go along with the budget, so after some back-and-forth with MT and others, wrote some text.

Worked with MT to list modular components and the amount of programming time we estimate they'll take, both for the IMT and for the publication engine, and turned this list into a budget to go to DI.

Met with MT and discussed DI's wishlist for the EMiC markup tool and publication platform. Following this, I sent a long email to both explaining my take on the situation (that the markup tool and the publication engine are separate projects and ought not really to be connected, and that I'd be less likely to be much involved in a publication engine). The feature list is shaking down. One key aspect that jumps out is the requirement for polygonal zones, which precludes the use of the standard FACS module in TEI; we may need to lobby for polygonal areas, and/or go back to SVG.

Good meeting to look at collaboration on a QT version of MT as part of the EMIC project. We may be able to co-write it as a cross-platform app, targeted initially at EMIC, but released as a general-purpose tool.

While on vacation I got the new QT 4.5 IDE working on my home computer, and it's very impressive. I think it's possible that it would be a good choice for development of IMT 2.0; it has:

• good graphics and drawing support, including SVG
• good XML support
• good Unicode support
• native compilation for Windows, OSX and Linux, as well as embedded Linux, S60 and Windows CE
• a new LGPL licence, which frees it up a bit

Drawbacks would be the need to learn C++ and QT (no small task), but that would be a good skillset to acquire for many future projects, I think.

Tatjana Radzeviciene contributed Lithuanian and Russian interfaces, which I've built into the program; updated the Help and website credits, and released a new build. I did notice that some of the captions had ended up with return characters at the end of them, so I had to remove those from the interface files; I think this should be something the Translation screen could prevent, so I'll have a look at that.

The file structure associated with installing IMT as a PortableApp includes a file called appinfo.ini, which PC pointed out hasn't been updated for ages, and still shows version 1.7. Updated it, rebuilt the installer, and posted it to the site.

I think the PortableApp stuff is probably superfluous; version 2 will just have a simple installer.

PC sent a new translation file and reminded me I hadn't changed the date and version on the help file, so I built a new installer, and also took the opportunity to prune some of the unneeded old copies of source files that were being bundled into the app.

HB reported that while images automatically resize themselves to the image component area when you load a file, that doesn't happen when you load an image into an existing or new file. I've now abstracted the resize component into a separate function, and added a call to it when you load an image; I also tweaked the resizing code to make it more precise about the resizing (it wasn't taking account of the size of scrollbars on the image display component).

The Image Markup Tool version 1.8.1.3 has been released. This is a minor update with one small improvement, documented on the web site.