Map Of London

Beginning a test encoding for myself so that I can test what I have to write to support the marginal labels and various font sizes.

Stonehill will be running a new course in November to encode the Wonderfull Yeare 1603 text, and the old materials we had for Eng 362 and the Hornbook had to be updated for the new context. I've created a new folder in workshops called encodingClass, in which I have a parameterized build process which enables you to create customized schema, template and encoding instructions documents and then use a standard build process to create a package for your class. It's tested and basically working, but I now need to enhance the new class's package to handle marginal labels using @rendition, explaining how to do it in their instructions, and making the XSLT handle it for proofing purposes.

I fixed the date contents-rendering problem discovered yesterday, which meant that the content of dates was being rendered, and lo, new problems appeared, especially with date content which is intended to be clickable (as are dates). I've ended up disallowing (by Schematron) editorial notes inside dates, and fixed a couple of instances of this in Stow by splitting the date elements around the supplied/note causing the problem. Did other minor tweaks to the extreme and the normalized views, and fixed some other encoding issues in Stow which are now revealing themselves. I also implemented a background image for items which are in peer review, and began to think about ways to render alpha and beta versions of the static site in ways that make clear that they are not releases.

The Stow rendering is all working as intended, but I made some tweaks today, including adding a new option for the user to Shift+Click on the "Diplomatic" option and get to see a real blackletter view. This is crucial for checking whether the actual encoding has correctly modelled the document features, since the regular "diplomatic" view does some font-normalization that can obscure font-shifts in the original. In the process I found and fixed a bunch of encoding errors in the CORN1 chapter.

I've implemented all the requests arising out of the meeting yesterday on rendering of Stow. Keep finding encoding problems in Stow as I'm doing this; the rendition encoding is particularly flaky at the moment.

I've integrated a new switchable view mode for Stow chapters. There's now a checkbox that appears at the top right of the page, which can be used to switch between the "normalized" view and the "original" view. These are the things that change:

• In the normalized view, there's no long s; in the original view, it's there.
• In the normalized view, most of the forme works are removed; I retain only the page numbers, which are all centred.
• Line-breaks and line-break hyphens are removed.
• Blackletter fonts are eliminated, and roman fonts used in contrast to blackletter are turned to italics.

The "normalized" view is the default; that's what you'll see first. The switch requires JavaScript, so if JavaScript is turned off, the checkbox itself is never shown, and you can't switch to the original view. If JavaScript is working in the browser, the checkbox is shown, and when you check and uncheck it, it turns on and off a single stylesheet in the header. That stylesheet overrides the default "original" settings, so when it's disabled, the original styles reappear. The switch also switches s and long s using JavaScript; there's no way to do that with CSS.

This also means that you can Control + F search using regular s in the normalized view, but with long s in the original view.

After some discussion with JJ, I've started testing some additional CSS rules to override the extreme Stow rendering and give us a more normalized view. At the moment, this is done by adding some semi-hard-coded CSS rules to the end of the last stylesheet using JavaScript. When I've run this by the team and if we have consensus, my preferred option would be to have this view enacted through a stylesheet which is added to the header at render time, so it's on by default; but to have JS (if it's available) add or show a checkbox which would disable that stylesheet when checked, so that you could switch to the extreme rendering and back whenever you want to. Right now you can use a URL search string to do it.

The static build broke at the end of the day yesterday, and the problem proved to be extremely difficult to track down. In the end it turned out to be caused by some incidences of <name> elements with @rendition but no @ref (due to an encoding error). To avoid this, I started by adding a Schematron rule, because I saw no reason why these should exist; however, it turns out that there are quite a lot of them, and although I fixed one or two, I had to give up working on them and instead added a new check to the diagnostics which ensures that we at least know they're there; they're mostly in unfinished mayoral shows.

I still have to figure out why this broke the XSLT. In the meantime, I've also reversed my decision to have ids.htm but not azindex.htm; since the latter was always linked from the footer, that's what we should go for, and we should fix the links to ids.htm (I've already added a redirect). I've fixed a bunch of other bugs in processing too, including the missing initials in editorial notes. We are slowly making progress.

Although I'm still tweaking a bit, I've basically finished the listings page that becomes ids.htm. I've drawn its content from the site/xml/original content, so that generated files are also included, and I've replaced the original azindex.htm (which was a published-only version of the same page) with a simple redirect. No reason to hide the fact that we're working on something, although we may not make the something completely available till it's published.

Got this working before leaving at the end of the day; did some more work at home and first thing this morning to clean up all the now-unnecessary @rendition attributes in Stow. This all has the added bonus that lots of relatively unedited Stow chapters will look reasonably good in the static build output.