HCMC Blogs

Installed MariaDB on my local machine, anticipating that it will be set up on the new server, and worked with a dump of the properties db. Stripped it down, removing the views (except for props_abbr, which is a convenience view for the web gui), and did a little testing. Had one problem that took a while to figure out: the dump also included the user which had defined the views (hcmc on lettuce), and this was pulled back into the db and prevented dumping of the stripped-down version; I had to delete the view and re-create it with the properties_admin user as the definer to get around it.

One annoyance: installing MariaDB breaks MySQL Workbench due to dependency issues. I found a workaround for this; installing per instructions on this thread generates a lot of errors, but the app works.

Meeting with SA and AC to plan the IRG phase of the project. 100 poems will be identified, and we've listed out some of many decisions that will have to be made with regard to preservation/reproduction/tagging of typographical features, contractions, errors, verse forms, rhyme, metre etc.

I did a test OCR using tesseract of poem #1 in the database, and did cleanup and corrections, to highlight the issues involved. The OCR was better than I expected -- better than when I tested early last year.

Completed all the tasks in the previous post. Surprised to discover that background watermarking was not very difficult. Created an SVG file for the watermark, and a temporary xsl:attribute-set which sets it as a background-image, then assigned the temporary attribute-set to all the fo:region-body elements in the output. Done.

Meetings, then the need to document what we decided in meetings, and blog other work before going home. And late duty.

Arising out of today's meeting:

• When rendering appendix indexes, place the label after the full list of allomorphs, not after the first one. This currently applies only to the Grammatical Morphemes, but will apply later to Lexical Affixes (see below).
• All entries in lex-suf and lex-pref should have a <label> (last element in first <def> containing "la".
• When rendering a list of allomorphs in the indexes, use only a tilde, not a comma + tilde, to separate them.
• Create another appendix index of all the placeName entries (where the <form>/<pron>/<seg> contains a <placeName> element). There are currently only two in the completed files, but 264 across all the files.
• Investigate whether a watermark for DRAFT ONLY can be added in XEP, so that we don't have to worry so much about the PDF being shared before it's finished.

Worked a bit on the VM 5 codebase: got all the files to validate, fixes XSLT problems that were a result of using invalid XML previously, generated an ODD file and schema using oddbyexample (reporting an oddbyexample bug in the process), and reported to the team. Two tickets down, about eight to go.

I've turned JJ's modern TOC for Stow into a nested list structure in an <abstract> element in the header which consists of items that look like this:

...
<item>Bridge Ward Without (Southwark)<bibl><biblScope unit="pages" from="336" to="353"/></bibl></item>
...

The page numbers referred to are pb counts, not forme-work page numbers (which can be wrong, as we know). You can now browse through the document in sections, from URLs like this:

?sectionNum=40&showDraft=true

The display of the document by sections has now been implemented on the dev site. It was a bit tricky, but it seems to be working OK. The (modern) title of the section appears at the top and bottom of the page, between forward and backward navigation buttons (in the same way browsing by single pages works). Where there are nested subsections, the header of the container section appears followed by a colon and the subsection.

Only complete pages are shown. I toyed with the idea of trying to show only the exact beginnings and endings of sections, but there are so many potential problems with this that I abandoned it -- marginal labels, for instance, cause problems, and it's probably misleading to display a partial page, when the rest of our rendering shows full pages.

The question remains of how/where to display the complete modern TOC. It's of course very large -- too large, I think, to be displayed in the "Page Contents" drop-down. One option would be an icon or a link somewhere prominent, which brings up a popover (a large popup which obscures most of the page) showing the complete TOC, in scrollable form, with each item constituting a link which dismisses the popup and jumps you to its section. Another option would be for documents like this to change the behaviour of the Page Contents button so that it brings up this larger popover instead of the usual drop-down.

On late duty.

It was a silly bug, easily fixed. Curses. Worked a bit more on the proposed workflow, and wrote to RVDB with proposed changes to what we had envisioned; it seems we'll have to live with the entire copyediting workflow being in word-processor format. Grrr.