Mariage

For text documents which have a thumbnail, the thumbnail is linked by including it in a <note> tag in the <biblStruct> in the <teiHeader>:

<biblStruct>
  [...]
  <note><graphic url="thumb_varin.jpg"/></note>
</biblStruct>

The XQuery finds this because it's looking for the first <graphic> element in the document. The XSLT is able to distinguish between <graphic>s in image markup files (which have no preceding "thumb_" in the filename) and these items, which do; the "thumb_" is only supplied in the teaser where it's needed. In the case of image markup files, the <graphic> the <facsimile> part of the document links to the main image for the file, and the thumbnail link is constructed from it, on the assumption (always true) that it exists; in the case of text documents, the thumbnail is the only image, so its filename is complete, but the XSLT is sensitive to this.

Talked with CC, and we decided that we want to show thumbnails of title pages in the teasers for text documents whenever we can. To that end, I've extracted and trimmed up teaser-sized images from all of the PDFs I have; CC has a couple more that I don't have, and she'll send them on. Once that's done, I have to determine how to make them work. Right now, the XQuery simply copies the first graphic/@url into an @n attribute on the <bibl[Struct]> tag which is generated as part of creating the TOC; this is then used to generate the thumbnail link, on the assumption that if there's an image, there's a thumbnail. I think we're going to have to be more explicit than this, though, so we can link in a thumbnail separately from a parent image (because for the texts, we won't be showing any larger image at all). This will require changes to both XQuery and XSLT, and presumably also to the XML of documents for which we now have thumbnails.

We noticed that the titles of engravings in our db sometimes didn't match the titles as shown in BNF catalogues; this led to some confusion when referencing the documents in articles. CC sent me a list of some of the BNF titles. This is what I've done:

• Where BNF titles are supplied, I've used them verbatim in the titleStmt/title, sourceDesc/biblStruct/title, and sourceDesc/biblStruct/title[@type="trunc"] elements. I have not created truncated versions of them, because few of them are all that long anyway.
• Where the BNF provided two titles, I have used them like this: Title one (Title two).
• Where the filename (and @xml:id) of the document did not match the title, I have created a new filename and @xml:id which does match the title (being a normalized, lower-case, truncated form of its first few words).
• For a few engravings for which CC didn't send me the BNF title, I have still normalized the filename and @xml:id. The aim here is to make it easier to find the XML document based on the title.
• Updated references to all documents which have changed throughout the collection.

I've always been unhappy about the appearance of footnotes in the documents; the over-large "Note 1" headings seemed superfluous, but it's not easy to generate normal ordered lists from these because of the nature of the processing and the popping-up. I've now rewritten that code to produce something that looks much more like a normal ordered list, but still allows the nuber to be displayed when the note is copied into a popup box.

Finished marking up the second article, and also had to make some revisions to XSLT and CSS to handle some new issues thrown up by it:

• Templates for <ref> elements can now handle linking between articles in the editorial collection, and handling of <ref> elements generally is slightly more robust.
• Blockquotes are now correctly handled in the context of articles, including better margins when verse stanzas or lines are quoted.
• Popups (for notes, biblio refs etc.) now no longer have a min-height. I can't see why I gave them one originally, but it led to lots of empty space in the popup if the content was short.

On CC's instructions, fixed the dates of the Agremens texts, which were mostly wrong, and tweaked the Milan text. Also changed the display of document titles in the Teaser so that it's using the full title instead of the truncated title used in the TOC.

I've been marking up the second article today, and have done most of it. In the process, I'm standardizing the markup practices, and I'll be in a position to document them in detail when I've finished and tested the document.

I made some decisions about the bibliography system for articles, and implemented them:

• Explicitly-included items in biblio lists at the end of the document are pulled in from the central biblio by the XQuery, and rendered in place by the XSLT. This means they can be customized (sorted into multiple lists with different headings, for instance), but they're still drawn from a single central source.
• Where <ref> tags point at biblio items which are not explicitly referred to in the article biblio, their items are pulled in by the XQuery and stored in a different list, which is not rendered visibly in the page. This means they don't appear in the explicit lists, but clicking on their links in the document itself will pop up their data.

I also fixed a couple of other things -- for instance, French quotation marks are usually set off from the quoted text by spaces, but these spaces (which were u+0020) were allowing wrapping, causing quote marks orphaned on lines. I've now used non-breaking spaces in both the XSLT and the CSS -- after learning how to do Unicode characters by codepoint in the CSS: :lang(fr){ quotes: "«\00a0" "\00a0»" "‹\00a0" "\00a0›" "‘" "’" }.

Began work on the task of centralizing all the bibliography items.

In the existing marked-up article, there was a combination of some local items, listed at the end, and some "centralized" items, in the main site biblio. First, I copied all the items from the article into their appropriate locations in the main biblio; then I changed the references pointing to them so that they point to the remote file. Tested this, and those links in the text are still working.

Next, I commented out the complete <bibl> items in the article file, and replaced them with items that look like this:

<bibl corresp="../../back_matter/biblio/biblio.xml#dejean_2003"></bibl>

My basic plan is to have the full text of these items retrieved by the XQuery, so that they're complete again. However, this is slightly paradoxical, since it means that there are references in the main text which point at the remote bibliography, and retrieve their data by AJAX, while the actual biblio entries will be sitting in the document itself by the time the XQuery has run and retrieved them. I need to think about this again, I think. The main difficulty is the requirement to list some items at the end of the article, while others actually referred to in the text are not listed for some reason. Also, I can't simply retrieve all the referenced items and list them in a sorted list at the end, because CC likes to divide them into groups ("Sources" and "Études citées"). I may need to accept a degree of redundancy in the interest of allowing maximum flexibility for article authors. Still thinking...

I've started work on a new stylesheet provisionally titled "Laon", which is fundamentally black text on a white background. At the moment, that's just too stark, but I'm going to keep hacking away at it for the next few weeks. One problem is that the shield image is white on transparent, and doesn't show up on a white background; it's not inserted through CSS, so it can't easily be changed, although I could trap the $pageStyle value in site_menu.xsl to insert a different image. I'll need to get the original SVG from Greg to make a new one, though, because the white one is anti-aliased.