HCMC Blogs

Began work on the NLM output for teiJournal, which will tie it into OJS. The metadata is basically done, and validates; it takes the <teiHeader> and converts it into the NLM <front> element. So far so good, but I am noticing that there is some information that really ought to be in my teiJournal structure, but which isn't, as yet, because IALLT has not required it. For instance, there should be provision for an abstract, which in NLM belongs in the metadata area. This conversion work will give me some clearer ideas about how to fill out the teiJournal tagset and encoding practices.

Reviewed the first of five DH2009 papers assigned to me.

PC sent a new Italian GUI file for the IMT, based on the new release, so I rebuilt the installer to incorporate it, and uploaded it to the site.

PG finished creating data files for the 2005 and 2006 Spanish practice tests over the weekend, so I created Masher unit files for them and built the units. I've also removed the Clue buttons from the 2007 exercises, at his request; they weren't really clues (just the actual answers), so they weren't really useful.

Left a little early.

Fixed a couple of infelicities (character encoding problem, layout issue), and added the ColDesp project as a featured project (to replace the old one from two years ago). This site really needs a proper rewrite.

A new version of the Image Markup Tool has been released, providing a small bugfix, and a new feature: the ability to distinguish between transcriptional and non-transcriptional annotations. This feature brings the IMT into line with recent changes to the TEI P5 guidelines, and was requested by several users. Version 1.8 of the IMT is available from the project website.

Finished the DocBook conversion code, and tested round-tripping, then updated all the help/tutorial files, and upgraded all the distro P5 files and HTML output. Built the installer and tested it; found a bug with the category manager, which caused the top category in the list to be obscured by the columns above it. Fixed the bug, tested the app and the installer on both Linux and Windows (VISTA), and updated the Website to make a formal release. I won't announce this to the TEI list until we've hammered it a bit.

Made huge progress with the usability aspects of the wizard today. These are the details:

• The wizard data structures can now read and write themselves from the search component of a page URL, meaning that a query setup can be loaded via a URL. This makes it much easier to test changes; you no longer actually have to work through the wizard in order to get some functional data.
• The URL for any query you create is provided to you as a link in the fourth phase of the wizard (review/generate tables), so that you can easily bookmark it and return to run the same query again later.
• Step-back functionality now also works for URL-loaded data, so you can load a previous query and then step back through it to make changes.
• The D-table (query results) layout/display is much improved. There's room for more work there, but it's already much more easily read due to more thoughtful font/colour choices.
• The display of user-constructed ethnicity groupings and city tract sets has been enhanced, so they're distinct from each other.
• The overall wizard page structure has been rebuilt on the model of the rest of the site, so that it blends in.
• There are now links between the (beta site) home page and the wizard page.

We got an rtf file created in Mac TextEdit containing Devanagari characters. The instructor needs to have that as a doc file because a publisher insists on that file format.

We installed the Devanagari font on a mac.

We can create a doc file and a docx file from textedit. Those files display properly in TextEdit and in OpenOffice (as does the rtf file), but we cannot get any version of Word on a Mac to display devanagari characters, even after we'd installed the Devanagari font (which of course has glyphs for the devanagari character range). Word didn't show the devanagari font on its font list.

We did get a version of Word running on Windows to display the characters in the .doc file by changing the font of the entire document to Arial Unicode MS (which ships with MS Office) and includes glyphs for the Devanagari character block. When we looked at that file on the Mac, the Devanagari does not appear, presumably because the Mac does not have Arial Unicode MS installed on it and Word on the Mac is not smart enough to figure out it has a font which will display the glyphs.