Image Markup Tool blog

This is what remains to be done for version 1.6:

• Create the dialog box for the thumbnail function. This should be highly configurable: at the top, we need a radio button pair for "Entire image" vs "Selected area only", which should be pre-selected based on whether there's a current selection or not; then there should be an output size area, with linked width and height elements; and finally OK and Cancel buttons. When OK is selected, a Save Image dialog box should allow you to choose between JPEG and PNG, and then the thumbnail function should be invoked with the values chosen.
• The thumbnail function needs to be given an Action and a Menu item (on the File menu).
• The thumbnail function needs to be documented in Help (and possibly in the tutorial).
• The remaining Help needs to be updated and rebuilt.
• The installer needs to be built and tested, especially on VISTA.
• The Website needs to be updated.
• The source code archive needs to be refreshed.

This could all be achieved in six or seven hours of work, so we could have this done by the end of the week.

Got the following changes done to the Image Markup Tool for version 6:

• Generated a new schema, removing my old custom code from the ODD file; the only customization is now the SVG element.
• Finalized the markup format for the <rendition> and <appInfo> elements.
• Updated the conversion XSLT files to convert old versions to the new version, and tested them.
• Rewrote the file i/o code in the application itself, to read and write the new formats.
• Updated the template file used to create a new document.
• Updated and tested the docbook import/export XSLT files. These are slightly complicated, because much markup has to be lost, especially from the <teiHeader>, but there's not much we can do about that. The real test will come when I edit the Help files in IMT.
• Cleaned out old schema files, odd files, etc.
• Updated all the tutorial examples and documentation, using this process to debug and tweak the conversion code.
• Updated the Web View XSLT code, and tested it.
• Updated the installer info.

There was little useful response to the issue of changes in <rendition> on the TEI list, so I'm going to have to make an executive decision to change the header encoding myself. This is what I think should be used:

<rendition xml:id="Transcription">
  <label>Transcription de texte</label>
  <code lang="text/css" rend="ellipse">color: #ff0000</code>
</rendition> 

Since I've already converted some files to an intermediate format, I've worked out a strategy for making the change:

1. Change the app so it writes out the new code format.
2. Load and re-save all of the files which have been changed so far (all three files in the tutorial folder are candidates, and some in test_data).
3. Rewrite the app loading code to read the new format.
4. Test file loading with the files previously saved as 1.6.
5. Update the conversion XSLT files to add the new rendition change.
6. Load a variety of known-good 1.5 files to check they load correctly, then save and reload them to ensure the 1.6 round-tripping is good.
7. Update the docbook conversion files so that they also use the new system, and test round-tripping some files to and from docbook.

Once docbook i/o is working, we need to start testing the help building system, which is based on mdh_docbook_to_html.xsl in the mdhHelp folder. Changes should not be required, but it should be tested.

Created the image for the menu/toolbar icon in Inkscape. However, when I tried to export it using my ScriptFu script in the GIMP to create all the BMP files, the script failed to run, presumably because of problems with the latest beta of the GIMP, which I'm running on my work machine. I'll have to try doing the operation at home, where I have older versions of the GIMP.

Created new XSLT for import/export of DocBook files in 1.6. The only change so far is the date/@value to @when change, but there will be more when the issue of rendition is sorted out. That's still being discussed on the TEI list.

Also made the change to @when in the Pascal object code.

Used my ODD file to generate a new schema from Roma, and compared it with the previous version. Apart from the date/@value attribute changing to @when, which I expected, another change has rendered <hi> tags inside <rendition> tags invalid in the header, which screws up my Image Markup code. Wrote to the TEI list about this; it seems like a silly change. I can't release another IMT until it's either undone, or if it's permanent, until I've found another way to encode that information and updated the tool to handle it.

However, I did write the four XSLT conversion files to transform older data files to the 1.6 format, and tested the last of them; that's out of the way. If the problem above is not fixed by changes in TEI, then I'll have to add to these files.

The thumbnail feature discussed in a previous post is an excellent idea, so I adapted the SaveScaledBitmap routine in mdhGraphics.pas to create SaveScaledBitmapRegion, which takes more parameters so that a region of the source image can be specified, as well as a target width. This works well in testing; now I need to create a GUI for it. I imagine this: "Create thumbnail -< from complete image", and "-< from selected area", then a dialog box where you can specify the output size. Then one of the two routines above is invoked, either the former or the latter respectively.

As suggested in the preceding post, it is possible to specify the TKernelResampler for the bitmap in the editing environment, meaning that scaling the bitmap is much better. It doesn't seem any slower either, on my machine, but we should test this on some slower machines to see how well it does with less horsepower to call on.

Now that we know TKernelResampler does a much better job than the default resampler, look at the possibility that the actual editing view, when resizing/scaling the image, could also use that resampler; it might be a bit slower, but it would be a whole lot clearer. Adding this as a task for November.

While working on new images for the Mariage site, I noticed that the quality of the IMT's "web view" scaled-down graphic was much inferior to the results obtained from scaling the graphic in PhotoShop. Greg and I started looking through the Graphics32 documentation, and discovered that the addition of one line of code could cause IMT to invoke a TKernelResampler when doing the downsampling; this is slightly slower, but produces a vastly improved result.

I've changed the version number to 1.6 for this, which means that I need to write a converter XSLT file; it also means that I need to generate a new schema from Roma, and check all the differences (I currently know of only one, the @value attribute having changed to @when on the <date> element, but there are bound to be others). This should be a priority now.

Greg also suggested a new "make a thumbnail" feature, which we kicked around till we came up with this:

If you click on Make Thumbnail when there's nothing selected, it defaults to selecting the whole image; otherwise, it works with the selection. A dialog box pops up which shows you the current Left, Top, Width and Height values, which are editable; changes are reflected in the actual selection. When you've tweaked those, you can specify the output size for your thumbnail; it can be proportional or not. Then you click OK, and get a file save dialog, then a thumbnail image is saved. This would be EXTREMELY handy for the Mariage site.