HCMC Blogs

Made a couple of small changes requested by the department, to the Faculty page.

Staying late to keep the office open again...

No response from Dr. Z. on the to my request for any final concerns this morning, so I've removed the password protection on the site.

The @target attribute on <ref> tags should always (so far, I think) point to the @xml:id attribute on a <biblStruct> tag in the bibliography. The editor doesn't check this automatically. There may be a way to force it to do so, using the schema, but I haven't figured that out yet. In the meantime, this piece of XPath evaluated as XPath 2.0 in oXygen will do the trick:

It gives back a list of any @target attributes that don't point to a <biblStruct> (a condition which suggests they're mistyped, or that a <biblStruct> is missing or has the wrong xml:id).

Did further work on the ODD file to add all the values proposed for different document types in the taxonomy here. The taxonomy itself needs to be updated, though; it assumes that the document type will be specified through a <classCode> tag, as was the case with the P4 projects, but I've decided to go with the @rend on the root tag instead, because a) it's actually a categorization which is made solely for the purposes of output rendering, and b) using an attribute list allows me to force its presence and restrict its values in a way that's helpful to encoders.

As I get further into marking up the first text, I've begun to flesh out the documentation for encoders. I've added a new Markup instructions document, which will grow as we go along, and also made some basic changes to the Textual features page, which overlaps it a bit. I've also posted a detailed query to the TEI list about whether block items such as lists and linegroups should ever, or need ever, appear outside of paragraphs. My sense right now is that they sometimes have to be inside paragraphs, but I can't think of any situations in which they must be outside paragraphs, so I might be able to customize the schema heavily to restrict them in this way, and make life simpler for encoders.

I've begun adding more blocks to the ODD file used to generate the schema, to restrict the range of values available for specific attributes. It took a lot of experimentation to figure out exactly how to do this; the only really useful documentation I was able to find was this, but even then I had to hack around at the values of the @mode attribute (they have to be "change" on the <elementSpec> tag and "replace" on the <attDef> tag, for some reason). This is what I have so far (both blocks are simplifications, as a proof of concept):

<elementSpec module="core" mode="change" ident="hi">
    <attList>
        <attDef ident="rend" mode="replace" usage="req">
            <valList type="closed">
                <valItem ident="bold">
                    <gloss>Rendered in bold.</gloss>
                </valItem>
                <valItem ident="italic">
                    <gloss>Rendered in italics</gloss>
                </valItem>
                <valItem ident="strikethrough">
                    <gloss>Rendered with a horizontal line through the middle of the text.</gloss>
                </valItem>
                <valItem ident="underline">
                    <gloss>Rendered with a line below the text.</gloss>
                </valItem>
                <valItem ident="foreign">
                    <gloss>Rendered in a distinct manner to highlight the fact that this word is not in the main language of the text.</gloss>
                </valItem>
            </valList>
        </attDef>
    </attList>
</elementSpec>

<elementSpec mode="change" ident="TEI">
    <attList>
        <attDef ident="rend" mode="replace" usage="req">
            <valList type="closed">
                <valItem ident="article">
                    <gloss>This is a full journal article.</gloss>
                </valItem>
                <valItem ident="review">
                    <gloss>This is a review of a publication.</gloss>
                </valItem>
                <valItem ident="editorial">
                    <gloss>This is editorial content.</gloss>
                </valItem>
            </valList>
        </attDef>
    </attList>
</elementSpec>

Dr. Foss came by for help with InDesign. He's facing a deadline of September 1 to submit a sample of his book to the publisher in camera-ready format (in other words, in PDF produced from InDesign), but InDesign is not the world's simplest program, and his main focus ought really to be on writing the book rather than fighting with the layout software. I'm not in a position right now to put in the amount of time required to get InDesign 3, learn it, and then set up the book in time for the deadline, especially since the source documents, in Word, use inline styles instead of named styles. However, I think we might take on the task of creating the final document in time for the January 1 submission deadline. I'll discuss that with our folks, and if it's approved, we'll get a copy of InDesign 3, and I'll begin learning it, and set aside some time in the fall to do the work. In the meantime, he'll work on implementing named styles in his Word documents, and learning enough InDesign to get something together for the September submission.

Followed yesterday's steps to prepare a sawmill image, so we now have seven rotating image. Wrote to Dr. Z to ask if we're ready to go live.