User talk:David - Bahaitext, a library of books about the Bahá’í Faith

From Bahaitext

I think that would work well, I like what was done with the chapters of the Suriy-i-Haykal, it works better than what I did. I think that doing something similar for big tablets would be good, creating separate pages for every hundred paragraphs, but only listing the first page under the categories. Have you read the Suriy-i-Haykal? It is invigorating and awesome. RuhiWarrior19 22:16, 2 January 2008 (MST)

Reading

It is hard to read long text on the screen, but we have it in San-Serif, which makes it ten thousand times easier. Also, changing skins on the mediawiki might allow easier readability, so if there were a way for non-members to acces the skins... RuhiWarrior19 09:19, 3 January 2008 (MST)

david

David, I am afraid I am going to have to mostly retire from here as well. I may drop in to help from time to time, but I am going to try and focus my online energy on my new blog http://seventyandtwo.wordpress.com. Sorry, and I love the project(s).

Allah'u'abha! RuhiWarrior19 10:35, 21 January 2008 (MST)

Star of the West, etc.

Is it possible you could allow Table of Contents to show up optionally? When I saw you added headings for at least the first issue of Star of the West, I got excited about the possibility to view headings at a glance since it gives a good idea of the contents at a bird's-eye view. Yes, it's possible with an add-on like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7203/ , but I think it is a convenient option to allow to the readers...

Also, as an idea for OCR, you might consider using the OCR'd text from the CD-ROM; if you can't get access from Chad Jones, you could use a macro program to automatically copy its contents into a text file and then proofread that (or have people proofread it) before posting. Brettz9 02:02, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

I was thinking about that just recently. I removed it by placing __NOTOC__ in the page, remove that and it returns, place __TOC__ on the page and you can get it to show up where ever you want.

Pros: viewing headings like you said, headings are also links so you can copy/paste them for others.

Cons: To me it's quite unsightly and messes with the formatting of the pages most often. You can't get it to be collapsed by default (I think) which would remedy these issues.

Any thoughts? David 14:01, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

Looking at the source code, it appears that if you add a <script/> tag at the end of the <head/> or later and call "toggleToc()", it will collapse it (since the default is to show it). Brettz9 00:13, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Correction: Wasn't thinking clearly. You can add a <script/> tag anywhere but should not call toggleToc() until an onload event to ensure that the elements are available. Since jQuery is available in Mediawiki, you can just use this:

$(function () {
    toggleToc();
});

Show/hiding page breaks

Here's some code you could use to show/hide page breaks

<script>
function toggleHR () {
    var hrs = document.getElementsByTagName('hr');
    var tpb = document.getElementById('toggle_page_breaks');
    for (var i=0, hrl = hrs.length; i < hrl; i++) {
        var displayNone = hrs[i].style.display === 'none';
        hrs[i].style.display = displayNone ? 'block': 'none';
        tpb.value = displayNone ? 'Hide page breaks' : 'Show page breaks';
    }
}
</script>
<input type="button" onclick="toggleHR()" value="Hide page breaks" id="toggle_page_breaks" />

Ah, the page break problem... I can see from your other comment about Star of the West that they become quite important since we'd be the only online source for that text.

It is my hope to migrate these to http://bahai-library.com/file.php?file=abdulbaha_star_west , and that would be a logical location since we have many other paginated texts there, but there is only volume 1 done there now, and it is easier to first format on a wiki (no need for manually typing tags, for example) and then copy the resulting HTML. That being said, of course it would be nice for us to be able to just directly copy the documents including pagination for use on our site, but we could get around that. However, I think you really ought to consider including pagination or at least paragraph anchors if you have not already because it is possible for other sites (e.g., via interwiki links) to target your site if they prefer to read the Writings in wiki format here. Also, I've made a proposal to HTML5 that they allow some extra attributes in the link tag which allows one to specify links in a generic way on any website (e.g., urn:bahai:Kitab-i-Aqdas:par:5) which could then allow the user (possibly prompted by websites) to choose their own handler for these generic links, e.g., allowing that link to lead to Reflib, Bahaitext, Bahai9, etc.). I made a Firefox extension which adds support for these proposed attributes, but the attributes are not standard yet.

Unfortunately I'd built this whole site without them because both reference.bahai.org and bahai-library have them, different publications of the same text can have different page numbers and when I formatted the site by paragraph numbers I had to split pages and do other awkward things, see SV.

Yes, I see. Thankfully in this case, I doubt the reprint altered the pagination, so we have just one version to work with. It would be great to get the page breaks, also for the sake of the TEI proofreading project which I believe has also been recording those page breaks.

What would be very helpful is a toolbox in the whitespace to the right of the text with "Show/hide page breaks, Show/hide external links in the text (eg, links to Bahaikipedia), Printable version, and Available translations of the text" Any idea about how to do all this? David 05:02, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes, making the pages-created-links extension helped me to learn some of the ins-and-outs, so I could do it. But your sentence isn't 100% clear to me about exactly where you want it. In my (I believe default) stylesheet for viewing Bahaitext, this information is not present, though I know the toolbox is present at Bahaikipedia. If you were saying that you want it done like at Bahaikipedia, then I can do this, yes. I don't know how you feel about giving access, but I could make the changes for you too if you're having trouble with access (though there's no rush on my part). In either case, let me know exactly where you want it, and I can send you the code making the customization (and explain it if you like). By the way, I could also allow certain code to denote a page break but where the buttons just collapsed the line break like at Reflib or expanded it like a full page break (as we often do at bahai-library.com) or toggle between 3 different options (the third being hiding it completely). Brettz9 06:09, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Btw, to add to my post just now, I forgot what you were going to do about making dumps of site content? Brettz9 06:09, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

That would be awesome, thank you. You had asked about the code structure of the site in an email before right? I'm happy to give you access but I thought first I should upgrade all my projects to 1.16 which should be out in the next few weeks. Btw, I finally have access back on my own computer so I can send you more specific information tomorrow. I'll communicate all the rest by email. Thanks again, David 13:24, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I remember at least asking about making dumps. That's cool about upgrading. Let me know... Brettz9 02:14, 9 June 2010 (UTC)