Image Markup Tool blog

Upped the version number to 1.7.2.0, and added UniSynEdit components and XML highlighters in the teiHeader editing area and the Annotation Text area. This is undocumented and untested as yet, so I've just built an installer and installed on Endive and Chicory so CC and I can find any bugs in the next few days.

The final steps to release were the predictable grind: trawling through all the documentation, tutorial and help looking for screenshots and explanations that needed updating, adding of licence info to headers of files newly released as open-source (such as my Unicode spin-edit control and find/replace dialog), updates of the Website, and lots of builds and tests of the installer. Got through it, and announced it.

The Image Markup Tool version 1.7.1.0 has been released. You can get it from here.

This is a build-update rather than a version-update, meaning that the XML file format used by the program has not changed. These are the major changes:

• a fix for a bug in the Web View output, which afflicted documents with very large numbers of annotations
• the addition of a feature which enables the user to specify the xml:id attribute of the annotation <div>, which is useful especially if you're integrating IMT documents into larger projects
• the addition of Find/Replace functionality to the GUI

The TIMTDoc.FindNext routine had an endless-loop bug caused by failure to detect wrapping around correctly (in other words, having searched the whole document and got back to the starting point without a result, it should have noticed that and stopped, but it didn't). It was caused by a failure to set the ItemIndex field to -1 when wrapping back around to the teiHeader; the teiHeader doesn't use ItemIndex, because there's only one of it (as opposed to annotations or categories), so I was neglecting to set that field at all, but the test for wraparound depends on both the field type and the item index being the same as the starting point, so it does need to be set to -1. Fixed it.

CT sent me a link to the new, more precise specification of @facs, which aims to prevent my generalized usage of it as linking anything to a facsimile element. @facs will now be limited to "groups elements corresponding with all or part of an image, because they contain an alternative representation of it, typically but not necessarily a transcription of it." That's still pretty vague, but it's intended, I think, to exclude annotation. IMT needs to change to reflect this.

After some consideration, this is what I think should happen:

• Version 1.8 should add a new checkbox/boolean to the category properties, specifying that this category is transcriptional in nature (vague, but so is the above spec!). I haven't yet figured out a way to store this information in the <rendition> element of the TEI file. Perhaps I should just add an @facs attribute to the <rendition> tag, pointing at the <facsimile> element?
• Where this boolean is set, the annotations should be associated with the area using the @facs attribute; otherwise, the @corresp attribute should be used.

If this proves too complicated for the moment, a quick solution would simply be to switch from @facs to @corresp.

Finished the Replace All functionality, and documented the Find/replace dialog box for the Help file. Also found a bug while doing this: creating a new category when there are no categories (the cat list is empty) would result in an index out of range error. Tracked this down and fixed it. The difficulty of this showed some excessive complexity in the codebase; the handling of categories is shared between four forms and several other libraries, because you can get at them in so many ways (using the actions in the main and Annotation windows, and also through the Category Manager itself). This could really use some optimization in the long run.

Build the Help file, so we're now basically ready to go, but I want to do some more testing before I go for a release. This one might even warrant a beta release.

Wrote the code for ReplaceAll, but no chance to test it properly because the debugger crashed Delphi and I ran out of time. I'll finish it tomorrow. Then we're down to testing, debugging and documentation of version 1.7.1.0, with a release possible within a week.

A Vista user sent sample Web View output where all the pixel offsets on the Annotation areas are NaN. This is mysterious. I set up a Vista VM and tested it out with their own data, but can't reproduce the error at all. Still working on it -- the user thinks it might be security software, but I don't see how.

Still the Vista VM will be useful...

This is the last of the major find/replace components, and I have the basics of it mapped out now. I should be able to get it done tomorrow, all being well.

Continuing some work I started at home this morning, I've added a new feature to the FormState library, so that it also (if desired) saves and reloads the current directories of dialog boxes. This will also be very useful for Transformer, which has lots of dialog boxes, and where users typically want to keep the individual directories they last used for each one of them.