Scandinavian-Canadian Studies

Encoded three reviews and the second half of one article, getting a good jump on vol 27. 120 minutes.

Everything is always provisional, of course, but I've done everything assigned to me, and also finished the cover and sent it to the print shop to make sure they're OK with it. Fingers crossed. 180 minutes.

Per editors, I've changed the way refs for blockquotes are handled in both the HTML and the PDF, and tested the results; I've also added Schematron rules constraining the use of italics for foreign words, and handled the fallout. I think we have both a clear and coherent policy based on Chicago 17 and a working set of safeguards that prevents (for example) proper nouns from being tagged as foreign (based on capitalization), and the same word or phrase being tagged twice in the same document. The Schematron enabled me to catch a lot more proper nouns that hadn't been noticed yet, and the second rule caught many repeated italicizations in the same text. There is a little bit of fancy footwork to do with the tagging of German, because regular German nouns are capitalized even when they're not proper; one article has a lot of those, and I've solved that by adding a language German language attribute to the tag which turns off the rule.

I have a lot more minor corrections from the last proofing to do, and there is one outstanding question relating to what rendering should be used with epigraphs; waiting to hear from HT on that. This volume may take another couple of weeks. 240 minutes.

Finished a rendering of the cover in Inkscape, and it looks pretty good. It took quite a while to get the fonts, weights and sizes to match the original, but I'm pleased with it. The output PDF has marks and bleeds, hopefully big enough (we'll need to run it by the print shop). The way I've done it follows the model of the Illustrator structure, but I can now see that a much better approach would be to build the front and back covers as individual groups, and make the spine a separate block, so that it's trivial to change the spine width. I'll do that for the next one. 120 minutes.

For many years now, I've been creating each journal issue cover (once a year) on a Mac that happened to be running an old version of Adobe Creative Suite, and which (it turns out) happened to have all the specific fonts the Illustrator file required. That Mac is now gone, so I've been trying to find a way to edit this year's cover. First I got a copy of the current Illustrator installed in a Windows VM; even after handling all the missing fonts by laboriously searching out substitutes, I was unable to save changes to the file because Illustrator claimed the document dimensions were out of range (they're not; it's about 6" by 9" and has worked for years on old versions of Illustrator). Next, we tried to get our original copy of Illustrator installed on the scanner machine; that eventually worked after GN was able to retrieve ISOs of the now-broken CDs from Rutabaga. However, there are still missing fonts, which we can't get access to.

Finally, I decided that in the interests of being able to pass the project on to a successor at another institution in 2022 (as is the plan), I would rebuild the whole thing in Inkscape. I'm about half-way through, and it's looking good so far, although it's very pernicketty and will take another few hours. Still not sure if I'll be able to get the pantone blue right...

240 minutes.

Did the BSK article; a few more questions for HT added to the growing list. 90 minutes.

Worked through the proofing corrections for another couple of articles. 90 minutes.

Made a huge number of edits on vol 26; I've now finished the editorial material and the first section (of five). I also had to rewrite some code to enable creation of a Dedication page in the form requested by the guest editor, and reorganize and debug a lot. There are conflicting edits from the two editors due to overlap in the final proofing, which is confusing and time-consuming. There is a LOT more to do here, unfortunately. 300 minutes.

The proofing changes came back for vol 26, and it turns out they involve all sorts of unanticipated alterations to the layout, which will take some coding rewrites. I've made a start, but there's a lot still to do in addition to the regular fixes for typos etc. 240 hours.

I've now done everything in my to-do list, leaving only three outstanding questions, which are with the editors. 180 minutes.