Day off for Claire school event.
October 21, 2008
Helped HN and AL to move the IAPL website from inside the PacificAsia departmental site into a secondary account which is under HN's control. Also added two links from the dept site to it, and fixed a small CSS bug.
October 20, 2008
Set up EM's workspace so she's editing directly on the server, and she worked through an example from a previous document to create a new header and frontispiece. Unfortunately, her many pages of previous transcription appear to have vanished; the file I backed up had no content in it other than the first line, and was timed at three hours before she finished on the 15th. It looks as though saving failed. However, she managed to get 18 pages transcribed again, and we now have solid backups of that data. I pushed it into the db to get some idea of how it would look; it's OK, but with such short lines, the left margin really ought to be moved over towards the centre a bit. I need to have a think about how pagebreaks are encoded, and what the default margins should be for prose text.
I now have code that can pull out lists of tracts ordered by city and year, in the form of <span>s with meaningful ids, as well as a list of cities in the form of a select object. I'm getting to the point where I can start to write the actual GUI code.
I've decided to forgo the use of JQuery and other such bloat, in favour of re-using the AJAX code I wrote for ColDesp and Mariage. That'll be a lot cleaner and easier to debug.
On instructions from JL and JH, I rewrote the XQuery which generates the list of schedules so that they're grouped by colony, and within each year, sorted according to the original order of the print documents (Despatches to London, Public Offices, Correspondence, Despatches from London).
I'd previously written some convoluted code to get form elements (checkboxes) for years and ethnicities; I've now rewritten that to use the meta-tables I generated last week, so it's simpler and faster.
Met with US to discuss a project he's planning that may involve writing a Windows application that uses speech recognition. Sounds like TPAPRO might be a solution for this, perhaps using Delphi 2009. Timeline is about a year before work starts.
Our helpful user reported more problems in the 14/7 crossword exercise, so I've fixed those.
October 17, 2008
Follow-up to this.
Stew and I discussed the various options and came to the conclusion that this will be a YAPP (Yet Another PHP Project).
I have converted the fp7 DB to a variety of formats: xml, xls, htm, tab, csv. This looks very much like a PHP/MySQL project now. Should be straightforward to create a script that converts a tab export from FMP to a big INSERT that gets pushed in to a DB and rsync's two image directories to update the jpgs.
Looking at how best to script Inkscape to rasterize svg source files.
Inkscape can be scripted via Python, but for the project at hand this might be more than we need. I suspect that we can write a much simpler bash script that will do everything by calling inkscape from the CLI and using built-in functions. A bit of reading here: showed me that I can do something like this:
/Applications/Inkscape.app/Contents/Resources/bin/inkscape -D -e ~/Desktop/11.png --export-area-canvas ~/Desktop/11.svg and produce a png that retains the canvas bounding box. If I drop the --export-area-canvas bit I lose the bounding box and have a zero-margin png. I can adjust the width and height with -w and -h in the usual way: pass it a width and let Inkscape do the math to arrive at a suitable height.