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A user reported the usual Firefox bug when creating an empty <ref> element; the empty anchor that results from this kills FF's rendering of the page. Easy enough to trap in XSLT, which I'll do.
Another report concerns the attempt by the application to fix non-well-formed XML. It will successfully escape ampersands which appear in text nodes, but fails when they're in attribute nodes (such as lengthy URLs with multiple parameters). This might or might not be fixable; I'll have to take a look.
Fixed the two problems reported in the last two posts, and provided a new version to the user who reported them. If everything works well, I'll do an official release. Putting this on as a task in case I forget.
The <ref> element's @target attribute should be converted to a proper XHTML link on when you export to create a web view.
Interesting issue reported by a user: if you have empty p tags in your annotations, then a self-closing div is output to the HTML. If you then open the file in Firefox, it will screw up, but if you give the file an .xhtml extension, it works fine.
I should put in a trap for empty paragraphs, and insert a non-breaking space into them. That could easily be done in the XSLT. Making this a task.
Now that we know TKernelResampler does a much better job than the default resampler, look at the possibility that the actual editing view, when resizing/scaling the image, could also use that resampler; it might be a bit slower, but it would be a whole lot clearer. Adding this as a task for November.
On reflection, I don't think this is a big deal, so I'm changing it to abandoned. It's curious, but no show-stopper, and we're busy right now.
The annotation window seems to restart at a height of 613px, even if it was closed at a smaller height, and the state storage XML file shows the correct height. Perhaps it's set to a minimum somewhere, or perhaps the height isn't being reloaded correctly. Check this out.
Update: did a little more debugging on this, and the program is correctly reading the window height from the file, and attempting to set it; the result seems to be that if the height is greater than 613, it defaults to 613. There must be something which is forcing a minimum height of 613 on this window, but it's not in my code; there are no constraints in the DFM, and although there are min height constraints on some of the form components, they don't seem to add up to anything like 613...
The icons built yesterday for annotations don't work at any size below 32 pixels; they're too complicated. A better approach would be to model them on the annotation icons in the Markin program (a yellow box with a black border and the letter A, with the top left corner folded down). This should be fairly easy to do in SVG. We probably don't need the Add icon -- we can use the simple Annotation icon.
It would also be helpful to find a square-ish speech bubble that can be used for comments and similar functions. Rounded bubbles render less effectively into small bitmaps because of anti-aliasing issues.
The app version info (major and minor) is crucial because it's used all over the place to identify files such as XSLT files for conversions and rendering. Made changes to the actual embedded version info, the schema filenames, the XSLT filenames, and the imtSchemaFileName global variable. Actually, this should be derived automatically by the app on startup, since it's just imt_ + Major version + _ + Minor version. Look at making this the case. It'll help prevent changes being missed in future versions.
The icons for Add Annotation, Delete Annotation and other related functions are poor. Replace them with something more clear and helpful, perhaps based on thumbtack-note images from OpenClipart.org.
Check whether any updates are required to the installer in order to exclude the old xsd schema files and include the new rng ones.
Then build the app, build the installer, update the Website, and release 1.5.
This is a reasonable decision -- if the zip output is to be a portable package, it should include the schemas. It's arguable this should be a choice, but that's a complicating factor for the GUI; we'll add it if people ask.
The schema changes will have to be documented on the Website and in the Help and Tutorial.
Once I've decided on the best way(s) to link schemas to documents, I need to implement this in code, in the TIMTDocument object, so the correct schema links are added to the files when they're saved, and preserved when they're opened. The latter might be much harder than the former, because if they're PIs they're not so accessible through the DOM...
Once this is done, we need to test the automatic conversion code (XSLT) which runs when opening a 1.4 file.
Simple task (as long as you don't forget one): check for all locations where version numbers are used in code, and make sure they know about the 1.5 version.
We need to automatically convert any old IMT doc to the new format before loading it. This is the list of XSLT files needed, and what should be included in each:
xsi:schemaLocation attribute from the root element.Other files can be dropped from the conversions folder and archived.
My conversation with Syd Bauman yesterday touched on linking non-XSD schemas into documents for simpler validation. All the approaches known are "unofficial" or ad-hoc, and seem to be based on processing instructions such as this one, which oXygen uses:
<?oxygen RNGSchema="../new_schemas/imt_1_5.rng" type="xml"?>
Syd suggested links (this and this) to other approaches; I need to look at those, and decide which we will include. It may make sense to include all of them, or pick one as preferred.
New release is announced here. Download it and put it in all the right places. Zip has increased in size significantly; check with the list why this might be. It looks a bit odd.
Greg and I began testing VISTA with non-privileged logons, and discovered a bug either in VISTA or in IMT, which presumably affects other apps too. When you try to save a file to a location where you don't have write permissions, the save operation fails silently; no error message comes back. The Modified setting remains true, so you can't close the document without being prompted; nevertheless, this is a serious issue. Look into this and make sure the apps show an appropriate error message when a save fails due to lack of privilege on VISTA.
Completed Feb 6: Having determined that the Nuvola icons, released under the LGPL, are better integrated into a project by building them into a separate dll, I've now done that work (at home, as part of a personal project). This dll approach should be integrated into the IMT and Transformer, so that both apps continue to benefit from the work I'm doing at home, which is expanding the library considerably.
...so that it calls the abstracted function CreateWebView, so no code is duplicated.
Done on Jan 31.
If there's a category which has no annotations, it nests within another category in the Web View output. Fix this. Categories with no annotations should not be included in the category list for output; or the XSL should ignore them. Whichever is easiest.
While creating the handout for John Lutz's class, it occurred to me that the Web View output now consists of seven files, and it would probably be a good idea to allow users to archive them into a zip file automatically (just as they can already archive the image and the markup file). This should be fairly straightforward to add (maybe six hours of work). Added as a task.
Done Jan 30.
Claire and France have begun marking up several documents without starting with the categories from previous documents. You can start a new document using categories from a previous doc, but once you've started marking up a document, you can't then go back and import categories from another. This makes sense as a feature, and it has a real use-case right now, so I'll add it for the next version. In the case of collisions (imported category has same id as existing category), the import of that category should be skipped.
The decision is made (forced on us, really, due to problems with the Mariage schema), and the updates have been planned in detail.
The problems we've encountered with getting working XSD versions of the SVG DTD have convinced me, finally, that I need to move the IMT over to using RNG schemas rather than XSD. This will be done in the next version, and I've added it as a task.
Scraps will use IMT to add structured metadata to the digitized artifacts it handles. The metadata is well-formed, pre-defined XML, not simple text or a series of <p> tags. Each artifact can have its own, user defined XML format, which currently has no DTD or schema (but likely will). All objects under an artifact will have the same XML format, and Scraps will enforce compliance to (validate) that format when the IMT file is loaded into the database. However, the current version of IMT has no mechanism to enforce compliance as data is being entered. It is also difficult and error prone to enter raw tags in the annotation field; this became very evident during the Dodds Scrapbook digitization and markup project done by Special Collections during the summer of 2006.
Scraps (and other IMT projects) would benefit from having a mechanism where a template could be specified that controls the metadata that can be entered and makes data entry easier. The template would be selected when the file is first created; possibly it could be specified when IMT is launched, via a command line parameter. The template would be an XML file, possibly a schema (W3C or RelaxNG). The IMT user should not be able to modify the XML file; it would be useful if it could be retrieved from a common repository, possibly a web location via a URL. Using a template would be optional, but once loaded, the template would have the following effect:
Unresolved problems:
This is also true of the <TEI xml:id="xxxxx"> tag, which IMT sets to the file name. The user should be able to see this ID, and ideally set it, to provide a static ID for the object being marked up.
Having static IDs, and ideally user-settable IDs, would help with linking an object in one IMT file to a related object in another IMT file. For example, on a scrapbook page that has been marked up in IMT file 1 there is an object that is a multipage booklet, and the booklet is marked up in IMT file 2. The ID of the annotation object in file 1 could be used as the xml:id in file 2, establishing a link between the files. The ID could also be used in the annotation itself to refer explicitly to an object that is in the same file or another file. Without static and visible IDs, there is no reliable way to establish such links.
Dealt with this here.
Got the following bug report from Paolo:
There's a strange bug that seems to affect both IMT and Transformer; I remember I reported it some time ago, though it's still persisting not only in the Italian but also in all the other translation files of IMT.
The following tooltips in the "Preferences" window, cannot be translated in Transformer nor are they correctly displayed in IMT, even if they appear as translated in the relevant italian.gui.xml file:
1) "Font size in points" (x 2)
2) "Number of seconds tooltip hints will be shown before..."
What is strange is that those items don't show up either in the translation screen after loading the English gui file or in the English gui file itself. The question is, where does the program take these items from?
WAS: The tutorial has lots of outdated info (especially about file formats). Proof it and fix it before you do anything else.
Completed November 8.
WAS: Post all updates to the Website, write to the TEI list, and also post on TAPoR.
Done Nov 11, except for TAPoR post; I can't find the page which allows me to post to the newsfeed!
WAS: All the site pages, including version info, release dates, and roadmap need to be updated ready for release.
All done Nov 9.
WAS: Source code libraries need to be updated, and their desc files checked for accuracy.
Completed Nov 10.
Do thorough testing of non-application-related aspects of the distro:
Test the installer on two or three machines, including Win2000.
WAS: Build a new installer for the IMT, including schemas, docbook and other XSLT, help files, tutorials etc.
Done November 10.