teiJournal

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.

The IALLT Journal is planning to move to a Drupal installation, but they want to maintain the XML versions of articles, so at their request I've used oddbyexample.xsl to generate a constrained schema and documentation for them. My own documentation, which is more intended for novice markup folks, will need to be updated to account for the changes in markup practice over the last year or two.

The backups page has never quite worked since we moved the project to Pear, and I've never been able to figure out why, but I finally worked through the issues in the flowscript that handles the backups, and discovered the problems were caused by paths, relative and absolute. Within any Cocoon pipeline, and it appears especially within flowscripts, the current context of execution is very difficult to figure out; what comes back from cocoon:/ in one script can be completely different from what comes back in another. In this case, three of the pipelines (the XHTML and the two NLMs) needed one path to call the backupLink.xq script, and the other two (TEI and PDF) needed another. I don't really know why, but it's all working now, at least.

My original NLM export code (from TEI to NLM 3.0) was written based on the old system of <biblStruct>s used in the bibliographies of the first two volumes. I'm now using a much simpler <bibl>-based system inherited from the Mariage project, so I had to add more code to handle this. I now have the NLM 3.0 export generating good valid bibliography lists. The NLM 2.3 is generated from the 3.0, so there's no need to change anything there.

US's article is now marked up and on the server, complete with its appendix (which was missing until today). Received the appendix from DC over the weekend.

Still have a question outstanding with the editor, and I need to make sure the live site is updated with XSLT changes before uploading.

Continued marking up US's article after getting some clarification on style from DC. This one has some more complex tables in it, in particular with cells spanning multiple rows, so I worked on ways to make those render acceptably. Using the TEI @rows attribute (and @cols) is fine when it comes to XHTML rendering, because they have corresponding attributes that perform the same purpose, so I got that working for XHTML. However, although there are XSL:FO attributes called @number-rows-spanned and @number-columns-spanned, they do not seem to be supported in the ageing version of FOP we're using, so I was forced to try other strategies. My initial approach was to use the @cols attribute to generate additional fo:table-cell elements as appropriate, but for some reason this also crashed the FOP renderer. In the end, I was forced to code in empty cells following each of the cells in question, and abandon the use of @cols and @rows in the markup. This is disappointing, but might be overcome with FOP 1.0, which we may be able to build into Cocoon in future, following the work done by RvdB, based on our build scripts.

I'm about half-way through the document now.

Did a few paragraphs of the main text, but I'm reluctant to go too far right now because I have a significant query in to the editor about the author's use of single quotes, and I need an answer before I do too much more markup. Also, oXygen is annoyingly failing to prompt me with available values from the local document when I type <ref target="#, something that previous versions definitely used to do.

Marking up article by US. Did the biblio, header and abstract, and found and fixed some minor issues in the preceding article in the process.