Image Markup Tool blog

A couple of problems were caused by the changes in the IMT 1.5 file format, and I fixed those easily. The rest are caused by the fact that, while previously we were using a simple "docbook_" prefix for all xml:id attributes in the DocBook output, that was changed in the reverse XSLT (producing the Docbook files) to be the xml:id of the document itself (derived from its filename), because our Help documentation works by XIncluding multiple files and all xml:id attributes need to be unique in the combined file.

This is logged as fixed, but I need to do some more rigorous testing to be sure, so I've left the task on outstanding till I've done that.

The icons built yesterday for annotations don't work at any size below 32 pixels; they're too complicated. A better approach would be to model them on the annotation icons in the Markin program (a yellow box with a black border and the letter A, with the top left corner folded down). This should be fairly easy to do in SVG. We probably don't need the Add icon -- we can use the simple Annotation icon.

It would also be helpful to find a square-ish speech bubble that can be used for comments and similar functions. Rounded bubbles render less effectively into small bitmaps because of anti-aliasing issues.

Created new SVG icons for Annotation, Add Annotation, Remove Annotation, Delete Annotation, Clone Annotation and Annotation List. These will be rendered to bitmaps and added into the 12 icon libraries at home (the GIMP on OSX works better than the Windows version, so it's better to do this on my laptop, and the icon library development is mostly done at home anyway).

The TIMTDocument object now uses processing instructions (as discussed in earlier posts) rather than the xsi:schemaLocation attribute to link to its schema.

The app version info (major and minor) is crucial because it's used all over the place to identify files such as XSLT files for conversions and rendering. Made changes to the actual embedded version info, the schema filenames, the XSLT filenames, and the imtSchemaFileName global variable. Actually, this should be derived automatically by the app on startup, since it's just imt_ + Major version + _ + Minor version. Look at making this the case. It'll help prevent changes being missed in future versions.

Change the docbook conversion XSLT files -- filenames have been changed to reflect the IMT version number, and contents have been updated, but round-tripping is broken, so some change in the app has not been accounted for.

...as detailed in this task.

The icons for Add Annotation, Delete Annotation and other related functions are poor. Replace them with something more clear and helpful, perhaps based on thumbtack-note images from OpenClipart.org.

Did some further research into this, and came to these conclusions:

• Syd's proposal is not significantly different from Makato Murata's proposal; they differ only in minor syntax, and the latter is an Oasis working draft, while the former is explicitly not a working draft; furthermore, Syd's position is that the TEI would happily use an Oasis recommendation if there were one. Therefore I believe it makes sense to use the Oasis standard rather than Syd's proposal.
• oXygen, which is our own favourite editor, used on all our projects, does not understand the Oasis processing instruction; therefore, for our own convenience, it makes sense to include the oXygen processing instruction as well, even though it is not a standard. oXygen is widely used in the TEI community, so IMT users will be familiar with it.
• I downloaded and installed a trial version of Stylus Studio, another common XML editor. It seems unable to handle RelaxNG at all. For XSD files, it uses the xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation attribute on the root element, and imports the xsi namespace. This is no use for RelaxNG, so we can ignore StylusStudio.
• I downloaded and installed a trial version of XMLSpy. Same thing: it only seems to handle DTD and XSD. Therefore we can also ignore that.

The upshot is that I believe the IMT should automatically include two processing instructions to link to the RNG schema, like this:

<?oasis-schema href="imt_1_5.rng" type="application/xml"?>
<?oxygen RNGSchema="imt_1_5.rng" type="xml"?>

I also think it might be a good idea to put these schemas on the IMT Website, and link to them there, like this:

<?oasis-schema href="http://www.tapor.uvic.ca/~mholmes/image_markup/schemas/imt_1_5.rng" type="application/xml"?>
<?oxygen RNGSchema="http://www.tapor.uvic.ca/~mholmes/image_markup/schemas/imt_1_5.rng" type="xml"?>

That would make it possible to validate a document from anywhere. The application itself should only add these processing instructions if they're not there; otherwise, it should retain any existing instruction, so that any user who wants to point to a local schema can do so. I'll implement this according to the task schedule.