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teiJournal

Journal publishing through TEI XML.
June 25, 2010

Finished document markup, added new rendering features

Posted by on 25 Jun 2010 in Activity log

Marked up the rest of the document (in-text tables, and appendices), and added a few new features and tweaks to the table rendering code. You can now do:

<table rend="layout">

To create a table which has no borders, for layout-only purposes, and you can control the width of individual columns in a table (in the PDF output) by setting a rend attribute in the appropriate cell in the first table row:

<table>
  <row>
    <cell rend="column-width: 20em;">...</cell>
    <cell>...</cell>
  </row>
  [...]
</table>

This forces a width of 20em on the first column in the PDF. This is important because otherwise, the PDF renderer does no intelligent table-column width calculation; it just distributes the width equally across the cells. It's not so important with the XHTML output because browsers do a good job of calculating and laying out cells, so the setting is ignored in the XHTML output.

I'm looking forward to being able to integrate FOP 0.95 into a new Cocoon/eXist build, so we can get around some of the keeps-and-breaks problems with the ancient FOP we have. RVDB's recent Cocoon-building scripts should help a lot with that.

June 23, 2010

Work on table rendering

Posted by on 23 Jun 2010 in Activity log

Four of the figures in this document are actually tables, so I'm now marking those up. The first one throws up something we haven't dealt with before, notes below tables; I've now added handling for those, and in the process I also realized that we've been processing the heading for a figure which is a table in the wrong place; in APA, Chicago and MLA, the figure heading goes below the figure, UNLESS it's actually a table, in which case it goes above. I've now revised the XHTML and PDF rendering to make that work properly.

There's more work to do here, but once it's done, I can document table markup properly.

June 22, 2010

Appendices

Posted by on 22 Jun 2010 in Hit by a bus

Appendices are part of the back matter, so they live in the <back> element, which is a child of <text>:

<back>
 
 <div type="appendix" xml:id="appendix_01">
   <head>Appendix 1</head>
   
 </div>
 
 <div type="appendix" xml:id="appendix_02">
   <head>Appendix 2</head>
   </div>
 
    <div type="bibliogr">
        <head>References</head>
        
        <listBibl>

            <bibl>...</bibl>

        </listBibl>

    </div>
</back>
June 21, 2010

Basic text structure

Posted by on 21 Jun 2010 in Activity log, Hit by a bus

The structure of the main document (the <text> element) looks like this:

<text>
  <body> (main text content)
  <back> (bibliography)
</text>

Inside the <body> element are one or more <div>s, which can be nested. Each <div> may begin with a <head> element containing its heading, followed by a series of paragraphs (<p> tags) or other <div>s. A typical structure looks like this:

<div>
   <head>Introduction</head>
   <p>Intro paragraph...</p>
   <p>Intro paragraph...</p>
</div>

<div>
   <head>Section 1</head>
   <div>
      <head>Section 1.1</head>
      <p>Para in section 1.1</p>
      <p>Para in section 1.1</p>
   </div>
   <div>
      <head>Section 1.2</head>
      <p>Para in section 1.2</p>
      <p>Para in section 1.2</p>
   </div>
</div>

<div>
   <head>Section 2</head>
[...]
</div>

[...]

The formatting of headings will be handled automatically, according to the APA styleguide, based on the level of nesting.

Marked up first few pages

Posted by on 21 Jun 2010 in Activity log

The first section, a review of the literature, is very dense with references, so it's quite time-consuming to mark up. Found one missing reference, and wrote to the author.

June 18, 2010
June 17, 2010

Did more biblio entries

Posted by on 17 Jun 2010 in Activity log

Perhaps this is one of those articles where the author includes everything s/he has ever read in the biblio, even if it's not referenced in the text...

June 16, 2010

Marking up abbreviations

Posted by on 16 Jun 2010 in Activity log, Hit by a bus

All abbreviations need to be tagged, so the system can provide an appropriate mouseover hint to help readers who aren't sure what they mean (and to help populate our abbreviation index). This is how to do it:

  • The first time a specific abbreviation appears in the text, tag it in full, with its expansion, like this: 
    <choice>
  <abbr>CAIN</abbr>
  <expan>Computer Anxiety Index</expan>
</choice>
  • Tag any subsequent instances of the abbreviation using just the abbr tag, like this: 
      <abbr>CAIN</abbr>

The system will be able to look back in the text to find the expansion for each instance of the abbreviation, taking it from the first, fully marked-up version.