Scandinavian-Canadian Studies

• Page body contents now fill the space available appropriately (although I think we may be able to move the page number down a bit and get more body space).
• Page numbers are now Times.
• The journal running title has now been replaced with the article author's name.
• French abstracts have been suppressed, obviating the need for layout changes to take account of the larger typeface and smaller page on the title page of articles.
• Several code bugs have been fixed.
• Images are now rendered slightly smaller, to give more chance that two will fit on a page (depending on how big their captions are).

Drop-caps are rendering un-dropped, for some reason -- they protrude above the para rather than drop down into it. I'm still working on that one.

Page numbers are now centred in the footer, which shows that the content region is too short, nhot the page. Still working on that.

For a couple of days now I've been trying to figure out an unusual error when trying to build PDFs. The symptom was that the process would fail to validate the XSL:FO, and therefore terminate, with a slightly different error each time, usually along the lines of [attribute] cannot have a value of "". Turns out this is a bug in the 64-bit Java vm, and can be got around by adding this to the command line in oXygen: -valid (turns off validation), or this to the formatter options in xep.xml: <option name="VALIDATE" value="false"/>. The former worked for me, but the latter did not.

A new review came in -- quite straightforward, now marked up and ready for proofing.

Vol 19 is to be published as a book, and has to be completely reformatted to produce the camera-ready copy for the publisher. These are the basic requirements:

Left and Right margins = 2”
Top margin = 1.5”
Bottom margin = 2.25”
Footer = 2”  [Page number centered at the bottom]
Line spacing = 16 pt. exactly
Space after = 6 pt.
Font size= Times New Roman 12 pt.
Footnotes= Times New Roman 10 pt.
Text alignment = Justified, including footnotes, endnotes, bibliography

I've made considerable progress with this:

• Made fresh copies of the XML source, XSLT transformation, and other ancillary files for this particular rendering, because all of them may need to be edited to fit the new layout.
• Changed all units from cm to in, because the publisher is US and uses imperial.
• Changed all page sizes, margins, borders, spaces etc. to conform with the publisher's requirements.
• Changed most font sizes to accommodate the shift from a para-level font size of 10pt to 12pt.
• Changed almost all Gentium fonts to Times (keeping Gentium for e.g. Greek and IPA).

The resulting volume is over 800 pages, but there are still lots of problems:

• The normal page content area seems too small (or perhaps widow/orphan settings are causing whole paragraphs to be shifted to the next page wrongly).
• Either the running titles are too high up, or the space between the running title and the head of the page is too big.
• The page numbers are still showing at the top of the page; I need to move them to the footer.
• Once pages are all stable, all the images will need to be re-positioned for optimal text flow.

Yesterday and today, made a number of corrections to volume 19 articles in preparation for a book publication, and also updated the Notes to Contributors PDF, and linked it from the main menu.

Met with JT, HT, and IK (from the library) about the following issues:

• Do we continue with the print edition? We're going to look at the bookstore's print-on-demand facility and figure out whether that would be a better option.
• How do we get the content indexed in e.g. the MLA index, while retaining our independence and the right to distribute for free? IK will investigate with MLA.
• Can we use OJS to manage the reviewing workflow, while keeping our publishing workflow? Possibly, more discussion needed.
• Can we produce ePubs? Yes, but we'll need to put in a proposal to the HCMC committee.
• Should we be looking at adding an OAI-PMH system? It's not clear whether any relevant harvesters for articles exist.

Finished entering substantial revisions to the Coates article from Volume 19.

Doing some belated revisions to a vol 19 article, about which there are many queries. I've just got started.

Brief meeting with PAB and RB to discuss the markup procedures and documentation.