HCMC Blogs

Five out of seven complete now.

IALLT are planning to move their site to a Drupal system, and incorporate the journal in it; Drupal will soon have support for TEI XML, so this is not a bad choice. I spent some time on a Skype call to the developers who will handle the IALLT site, and then packaged up the existing webapp with some basic instructions for them, so that they can test it on their desktops, and perhaps use it as a way of generating the XHTML and PDF content during the changeover.

Meeting with NB, RP, and KSW about planned grant application.

This is part of making it easier to access and manage ImtLinkGrp and ImtLink objects by using a QString key. The key in this case is the linkType attribute, which we want to ensure is unique anyway.

CC and I have come up with this plan for providing document introductions on the site:

• CC will begin adding a new element to the <sourceDesc> in text documents. It will look like this: <bibl type="introduction"> [Detailed intro to the text...] </bibl>
• If that element is present, its contents will be displayed at the head of the document in the black box that's already there. If that element is not present (because it hasn't been added yet), the black box will display any other bibl tag inside sourceDesc (meaning that it will display the same text as is shown as a teaser when you mouse over the title of the document in the TOC page).
• I will implement a method for displaying all the metadata in the teiHeader, based on the way this was done in the ACH code, and as is also done for ScanCan. It will be handy to have that code available for P5 projects anyway. This can appear as a button at the top left of the page.
• The same approach cannot easily be taken with the images, because of screen space issues. We have discussed the possibility of using a special annotation called "Introduction", but I think it might be better to have a link at the top of the page, next to the metadata link, which will pop up the introduction over the top of the image. This has the advantage that all introductory material is encoded in the same way.

In the process of working on units 8-12, I discovered that there is an issue with the creation of titles for the index page in the Masher when the file itself is an old .jbc file. I've therefore started renaming all the JBC files with the JQuiz extension. Occasionally, it seems that I have to load them into JQuiz and save them as well, before they end up in a format where the Masher correctly reads the exercise title.

So this is what I'm currently doing for each new unit that TNB has finished with:

1. Use my MultiReplace app to do two search-and-replace operations on all JCloze files and JQuiz files containing short-answer questions. These are the changes:

   <keypad-characters></keypad-characters>
   
   to:
   
   <keypad-characters>&#x0100;&#x0112;&#x012A;&#x014C;&#x016A;&#x0101;&#x0113;&#x012B;&#x014D;&#x016B;</keypad-characters>
   
   and
   
   <include-keypad>0</include-keypad>
   
   to: 
   
   <include-keypad>1</include-keypad>
   
   

2. Rename all .jbc file to .jqz.
3. Use gedit to search and replace .jbc with .jqz in the Masher file.
4. Open the Masher file and rebuild the whole unit.
5. Check that the index has the right titles; if one appears as "Exercise title", then open the data file in JQuiz and save it again.

Burned a CD with all the content to send to the printers, after confirming by phone that no modifications were necessary to enable the separate printing of colour pages.

On KE's instructions.

On DR's instructions.

Leaving early. My G&T is getting too high again.