HCMC Blogs

Took Tuesday 4th Sept. off to burn off some G&T.

Leif finished the markup of the biblio for the next vol 17 article, so I set him up as a user on the eXist db and showed him how to upload docs to test them out. We went through a range of issues emerging from this bibliography, some of which require clarification from JT, and he's now working on updating Trish's original documentation to clarify and expand it, so that it reflects our current practice.

Made some final fixes to XSLT and CSS based on the W3C validator, and reported to the editors as follows:

I've finished a first pass through generating the XHTML output from the two documents we've marked up so far. The results are here and here.

Some points to note:

• Both XHTML and CSS validate, according to the W3C validator.
• My choices as to fonts, spacing, sizing etc. are just arbitrary; I'll need your input into that.
• Wherever APA has anything to say about how something should be presented, I've tried to follow it (for instance, in the display of tables with no vertical and few horizontal lines), but I may have missed some APA diktats, so do let me know if you see anything odd.
• Notes and references work as popups on the right of the text (hence the larger margin on the right). However, if the user has JavaScript turned off, they should just work as straightforward internal links.
• Images embedded in the text are links to full-size versions of themselves.
• Metadata is embedded in the source of the document as Dublin Core meta tags. I plan to add some JavaScript which can parse it out from the header and present it to the user in a more human-readable form, but the meta tags are important for machine-reading, and for folks who turn off their JavaScript.

I think it would be useful at this stage to concentrate on making sure all the display features are working as they should, and following APA, and on making some basic choices about font style and display characteristics. Once we've got an XHTML appearance we're happy with, I can start porting that over into the XSL:FO/PDF output, which is a bit more tricky.

Other things on my mind:

I'm wondering if it would be useful to have a view of the text in which the JavaScript and CSS is embedded directly into the document, so that it would function as a single portable file. This portability would be undermined by the fact that images would still have to be externally linked, though, so perhaps it's pointless.

Tables have a minimum width which is determined by the minimum wrappable size of their content cells, so they sometimes stick out beyond the text column -- see, for instance, Table 3 in Yaden, with your browser window sized a bit smaller than usual.

This is probably unavoidable, but if you'd like to put some thought into ways to avoid it, I'd be happy to have suggestions.

URIs in output are often problematic because they have no spaces which allow text-wrapping to trigger. Added a custom XSLT function to add zero-width spaces after each slash and period, to make text-wrapping feasible for the user agent.

We have a close-to-completion version of the new English dept Website, which we're currently testing on one of our lang sites, and I got an updated set of files for it today. Posted the new files, and looked at every page to find any errors. There are a couple of link problems and one style glitch, as well as a lot of key pages missing any info and other pages with content that should be removed before going live. I'm corresponding with the developer and the English dept. representative about this.

The new batch of scans (39) will need to be marked up, and the first stage is creating IMT files for each of them. That's done; each one is waiting for further metadata from CC before it can go into the pipeline for the markup process.

SCHEDULED LAB DEMOS FOR UPCOMING JAPANESE, CHINESE, AND SOUTH EAST ASIAN LABS.

History reported problem authenticating at http://web.uvic.ca/history/intranet/ . After an hour of testing, I reported to Joe Sparrow, who gave me the following advice, which worked:

The Basic Auth provider on web.uvic.ca is now LDAP. If you want to use an .htaccess and .htpasswd file you will need to put

AuthBasicProvider file

into your .htaccess file, probably before the rest of your access based commands.

I'll look at the english dept's graduate application review site (which uses a similar htaccess setup) and make necessary modifications.

Sanako Duo
Real Player
Quick Time
VideoLAN (VLC): http://videolan.org/
Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Praat: http://praat.org/

Paint.NET: http://getpaint.net/
Image Markup Tool: http://www.tapor.uvic.ca/~mholmes/image_markup/

OpenOffice.org: http://openoffice.org/
jEdit: http://jedit.org
Concordance: http://www.concordancesoftware.co.uk/
Powerpoint viewer 2007
Acrobat Reader

Filezilla: http://filezilla.sourceforge.net
Firefox: http://mozilla.com
Nvu/KompoZer: http://nvu.com/http://kompozer.net

Deutsch Na Klar

7-zip: http://7-zip.org
PDFCreator: http://pdfforge.org - set up as default printer
Antivirus (currently CA AntiVirus)

Language support currently installed:
Language Location Keyboard/IME

Arabic U.A.E Arabic 101
Chinese Hong Kong S.A.R. Chinese Traditional US Keyboard
Chinese PRC Chinese Simplified Pinyin IME 3
Chinese Taiwan MS New Phonetic IME 2002a
Dutch Netherlands Dutch
English Canada US
English US US-International
Farsi Farsi
French Canada Canadian Multilingual Standard
French France French
German Germany German
Greek Greek
Hebrew Hebrew
Icelandic Icelandic
Indonesian US
Italian Italy Italian
Japanese Microsoft Office IME 2007
Korean Korean
Microsoft Office IME 2007
Norwegian Nynorsk Norwegian
Portuguese Brazil Portuguese (Brazilian ABNT)
Punjabi Punjabi
Russian Russina
Spanish Traditional Sort Spanish
Swedish Swedish
Thai Thai Kedmanee
Turkish Turkish Q
Vietnamese Vietnamese

Forgot to post this last week:
My motherboard is toast, and it took me nearly the whole week to deal with it.
Discovery had a quick response once it was in their shop, and the verdict is that it's a warranty-replacement motherboard. Their best guess is 3 weeks for me to get it back.
In order to get back to work I pulled the drives from my dead box and rebuilt another machine.

Update: Got an update on Oct. 29. Apparently the new board is at the borderr and I should have the machine back Wednesday-ish.