Project Members: Susan Brown (sbrown@uoguelph.ca), James Chartrand (jc.chartrand@gmail.com), Grant Dickie (jgrantd@gmail.com), Dave Lester (dave.lester@gmail.com)
Uses TEI-Ann plugin with CKEditor
INSTALLeXist.txt :
- Documentation and notes on installing the Ckeditor with TEI-Ann as a plugin in the oXygen and eXist backend framework.
INSTALL_NoeXist.txt :
- Documentation on installing Ckeditor and TEI-Ann using the README file included in the downloaded .tar file from the TEI-Ann page in SourceForge
- Validation of Markup based on TEI Lite Specifications
- This validation should be done in an efficient and non-intrusive way, e.g.: oXygen
- Doesn't allow you to make too many mistakes before correcting you
- Multiple forms of validation - restrictive vs. flexible
- Gives feedback on what you're doing wrong and how to correct
- Editor never allows for entering tags out of context
- Connected to Freebase or other Name Authority Repository
- Repository shows up in a side window
- Tree structure of named authorities shows up on side panel to illustrate to the user the name authorities they have already inserted.
- Machine-learning program that recognizes semantic concepts and the tree
structure of a TEI document
- Guesses what the user is describing
- Code Completion is available in the toolbar as a drop-down
- Ideal would be having code completion or code guessing available as the user is typing and to have either a tree structure of possible elements on the sidebar to select from, or to have a dropdown of possible elements
- Texts/XML/Manuscripts/Database Data is loaded from an external location and automatically
parsed into a readable format by the editor.
- Example: User A has a document hamlet.xml that is marked up in TEI Lite. User A loads the document into TEI-Ann, which then sends the document and parses it such that all of the taxonomies, named authorities, and XML elements are sorted in an efficient 'view' of the text.
- Need to have 'placeholder' in the bottom that shows the user their place in the XML (Shows context)
Simple pro/con list:
- Pros
- Very easy-to-use interface
- Ready-made CSS files
- oXygen and eXist are both powerful tools used by many in the field
- CKeditor works with jQuery
- Cons
- Difficult setup
- As the code stands now, the setup requires developers to use oXygen and eXist as their backend. That can be advantageous for some programmers, but in this case we did not have a suitable backend already in place. This meant a lot of work (See INSTALLeXist.txt) to get things started. Once started, everything is running great. However, simple things such as not being able to batch-transfer files to eXist collections really makes the process tedious.
- Code is not well documented
- This may be another issue that can be solved soon with further development. Right now, it seems that the code is for solving a specific problem in the markup community. With time and further API documentation, it can be improved. The documentation page for TEI-Ann should have some examples of setups. The example.xml found with the unpacked code does provide some illumination into how to use the tool, but for some people there should preferably be a variety of examples to illustrate best practices. When I got stuck several times with Javascript errors on my index.xml page that used TEI-Ann, my instinct was to go to the source code and debug. I noticed that there was not that much in the way of comments in the code - something that I would suggest to improve, just so that programmers can see the logic behind the code.
- Difficult setup
This plan turned out to be the best option for us, since it provided the flexibility and control that we want out of an editor tool. Take a look at index.html and you'll see an example of attempting to accomplish just that.
Another try was actually adding the plugin into the CKEditor framework. This is done by adding a folder inside of the plugins/ckeditor/plugins folder and editing the plugins/ckeditor/config.js file. More CSS and image icons have to be added to the root directory, but once this is done, a complete and working customized plugin is ready for CKeditor to use. We think this is the best way forward for right now, until TEI-Ann catches up with providing hooks for integrating xForms with jQuery.
More on this topic is covered at : http://www.voofie.com/content/2/ckeditor-plugin-development/
Customizing the CKEditor
Documentation TEI-Ann