Mariage

LSPW still working through the 1609, and coming across some issues with letter spacing. Up to now, in titles and the like, the markup folks have been inserting extra spaces between letters, but that's a bit hit-and-miss, and it makes a bit more sense to use letter-spacing, so I've included an example for her to work with.

All working.

Accent standardization: We need to standardize a little bit of accent stuff with the French, as the punctuation is different. The way I learned it, which I believe is the standard way is the following:

1. Spaces before semi-colons and colons, but not before commas or periods. E.g. Le chat aime bien la souris ; elle est très mignonne.
2. Spaces before exclamation marks and question marks. E.g. Qu'est-ce qui s'est passé ?
3. Periods, in French, go OUTSIDE quotation marks. E.g. : « Après de nombreuses tentatives, le Cervin fut escaladé pour la première fois le 14 juillet » (LPRNP, p. 407).

LSPW fixed a lot more issues in the XML for the 1609 Sonnet, and I fixed a couple of validation errors and pushed it into the db, then addressed some outstanding problems, in particular by edits to the CSS and XSLT to make normal behaviour for some verse stanzas and lines more explicit; this avoids verse lines being centred when they shouldn't be.

LSPW has been working through the 1609 Sonnet and highlighting things that aren't displaying correctly; she sent a batch of issues to me, some of which I fixed in XML (mostly adding CSS rendering descriptions code in appropriate attributes) and some of which needed tweaks to the XSLT. We're getting there...

LCC has now finished the Varin markup and is going back through the text, listing items that need to be tweaked and fixed in the XHTML view on the site. There are lots of these, so it's best if they get posted on the blog where we can go back and deal with them systematically.

Clarifications:

1. So far, decent progress. I think I finally understand some of the basic mechanisms of xml, which is exciting, after having done it (intermittently, to be fair) since January!
2. New fun batch of issues: I'm struggling with if I can encode the borders of the text I'm working on. I've spent the last half hour on the TEI website and I'm starting to wonder if this is indeed possible. I found a "decoNote" that included borders as part of an "msDesc", but since I'm not working on a manuscript, I don't think this is appropriate. Also if I were to use this element, it has a number of obligatory component elements that aren't applicable seeing as I'm not working on a manuscript! So still working on that...
3. Still need to encode the stamps and make sure my foreign elements are correct and that they should not be "xml:lang"s instead.

From LSPW, looking at the two Sonnet texts on the site:

1. After the title page of both sonnets, there should be a blank page. In the 1621, there is one, but the blank page is missing from the 1609.
2. Italic font style was used to transcribe the "Epistre" part in the dedications of the 1609 text but the rest of the text shows up in normal text that is not stylized as it is in the 1621. However, in comparing the facsimiles, the font could still be considered to be in italic style all the way through. We should change this in the xml to reflect this.
3. In the 1609, many of the capital letters starting off a new paragraph are too far off in the left margin. These include lines 273, 301, 322, 343, 377, 432, 454, 477, 499, 648 in the xml.
4. The 1609 title "SATYRE MENIPPEE." (line 699 of the xml) where the actual sonnet begins is not centred and the word "SATYRE" should be above the word "MENIPPEE".
5. In the form work of the 1609 version, in the header there's a space after each letter to reflect the style as seen in the fascimile. For instance, instead of writing "SATYRE" we have "S A T Y R E". This should be done for the 1621 as well.
6. On page 19 and 21 of the 1609 (there are other pages as well), the phrases "LE SAN-GVIN." (lines 1239-1240) and "LA FLEG-MATI-QVE." (lines 1262-1264) appear on the left when they should be on the right.
7. If you look at page 18 of sonnet 1621 on the website, there is text on the left margin that shouldn't be there. There must be something wrong with the xml but I don't know how to fix it so I'll leave it to you.

LCC has now got quite a way into the markup of the Varin, so I've pushed it into the db to see what it looks like. It's pretty good all round, but there are some issues that need attention:

• The layout of the recto and verso pages is very different (margins are tiny on the binding side, and huge on the other). The current simple system for specifying the original page layout can't easily do this, so it needs to be elaborated. We can distinguish between recto and verso based on page number and/or page number position, and perhaps specify two different page layouts.
• There is a lot of quotation without quote marks in the original text, and LCC has made a nice, useful distinction between two different types, marked up with <quote> and <said>. Right now, <said> is not handled at all, and <quote> always results in the insertion of quote marks. What we really need is a way to mark <quote> tags which do not have quote marks in the original (perhaps @rend, or @type). Once we have this, we'll be able to do something quite neat: render the "original view" without quotes, and supply quotes in the "version continue".

Spent a lot of time tweaking XSLT and the markup of the Sonnet documents to get some output which is reader-friendly and represents the original texts somewhat. This is what I've done:

• Fixed many inconsistencies in the 1621 markup, where older markup formulations had been used instead of the ones we later settled on. This included lots of fixes for <fw> tags to make them consistent with the 1609, and with the Amboise texts.
• Added basic layout information to the heads of both Sonnet files to set page sizes etc. This will need more tweaking, though.
• Fixed some font sizing issues in the running headers in 1621. The headers in 1609 still look too small, but I need to check against the Amboise, which is the standard, to make sure I'm handling them correctly in the 1621 before I move on to the 1609.
• Fixed a distracting background colour for the <unclear> tag output.
• Added a comment ("KTO", for "Keep Tag Open") inside XHTML <div>s which occasionally end up empty in the output, otherwise the Cocoon serializer self-closes them, which screws up Firefox's DOM and makes the layout a mess.
• Pushed copies up onto the SAN so the editors will start from my fixed versions, and uploaded them into the db for testing.