User talk:Brettz9
Feel free to leave comments below...
PDF page box[edit]
Is showing up in odd places: eg Bahá’í_World/Volume_3. Can you put this on a to-do list for later? David (talk) 23:35, 29 August 2015 (UTC)
- Currently it looks for an ID "pdfPage" into which to insert the form with textbox but only if the page title is within a whitelist. I then have some code to handle "Baha'i News Letter", but otherwise just look for File:[series]_[issueNo].pdf. While I could get rid of the whitelist, so the JS doesn't need to be modified each time, you'll have to somehow insert a flag I can use to know that this PDF differs from other pages with that template where you don't want a textbox inserted. You could either use a different template or allow for an argument to the existing template which would only add the empty "pdfPage" span when desired. And as discussed elsewhere, if you want to pass in a non-default argument to indicate a different structure for the File:...pdf page title, I can also make an exception to the page title it looks for; in such a case, you'll have to tell me the ID of the display:none element to look for. Brettz9 (talk) 19:44, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
Would the easiest thing be a change to the home template removing pdfpage and adding a variable like {{{filename|}}} which is referenced on a page like this: filename=Bahai_News_123.pdf then just construct the URL /index.php?title=File:{{{filename}}}&page={{{user-input}}}? The down-side is having to add this 700 times for every Baha'i News page. The up-side is it will work with every pdf page, on only the pages we desire, for lots of different page titles, and requires loading only one piece of javascript code. I think those benefits outweigh the time it will take to migrate Baha'i News to this format. (And perhaps a bot or mouse-movement script could make such a migration quite easy) David (talk) 20:27, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
- How many other issues do you think you need to add? And how many exceptions to the File:[series]_[issueNo].pdf pattern? I generally believe that the default behavior should handle the majority of cases with minimal effort. It is also possible that we can add a whitelist for Baha'i News and then, if a parameter is supplied, add that to the whitelist as well. Brettz9 (talk) 22:06, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
- Lots, there are potentially 21 on the Periodicals page, plus I'm going to convert the Riḍván_messages and probably find more to do in the future. For example on Ridvan messages, uploading a PDF file is so much easier than managing text, it gives the user confidence in what we're presenting, and provides them an easy way to print the letter in its original format just by selecting print within the pdf viewer they're using, and it doesn't preclude the ability to add text later on it's own page.
- Btw, I hope we can minimize the number of changes which affect links; I have a number of links to Star of the West which are now going to be broken by moving text content to /Text. Brettz9 (talk) 22:06, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
- If the links are on bahai9 I can have a bot fix them all. Speaking of links, regarding Baha'i World, my long term plans will probably involve changing links there too. I'm hoping to avoid breaks like pages 1-100, 101-200,etc. in favor of ones based on topical sections. I think we've explored the idea of being able to search through section headers right? That would be a worthwhile thing imo. David (talk) 22:15, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
- Yes, I also prefer it broken into sections; section header search is good, but also because one can use great add-ons like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/headingsmap/ that take advantage of HTML headings--though again, hopefully after moving to sections, the section groupings will not change after that, breaking links of people who may not be on our sites--e.g., discussion forums, Wikipedia, blogs, etc. I have a page hosted on bahai-library.com (I think I converted it to be JS-based, so it can be reused too) which accepts a book path and page number and figures out the logic to translate it into a book/section/chapter/verse/etc.; it might be good to always link to this and just update that script as needed. One good thing about using interwiki links is that one can change those link targets without requiring a bot. (I also still hope to add back my code allowing "bahaiwritings:" links so the user can choose their own site for viewing the Writings.) Brettz9 (talk) 05:59, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
- If the links are on bahai9 I can have a bot fix them all. Speaking of links, regarding Baha'i World, my long term plans will probably involve changing links there too. I'm hoping to avoid breaks like pages 1-100, 101-200,etc. in favor of ones based on topical sections. I think we've explored the idea of being able to search through section headers right? That would be a worthwhile thing imo. David (talk) 22:15, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
- Btw, I hope to eventually extend the function provided by our pdf documents. See for example User:David/Sandbox/Pdf which has a functional TOC, and text when selected is accurate and can be copied directly from that document. I'm not sure how to do this, but I'd like to replicate the function, building in TOC links to docs that have them, and also replacing the computer-generated OCR with our proof-read versions. David (talk) 22:31, 30 August 2015 (UTC)
- I figured out how to do the TOC linking, a little tedious but not hard. See Star_of_the_West/Volume_3/Issue_1 for an example. Firefox nicely highlights the links a little as you hover over them but chrome/IE do not.
- That is pretty cool. And I love the idea of replacing the OCR with proof-read versions. This kind of thing would be particularly useful for Persian originals of the Tablets or such. As far as building confidence though, PDFs can be faked too, so I've never been so convinced by that argument; but I do admit it is nice to have the PDFs available for those who wish to see the original formatting. Jonah also has moved to this PDF approach, and apparently people like them, but for my personal use, I honestly despise them--they are slow, cumbersome, circumvent the normal tools in the browser (and any add-ons) for viewing text, linking to specific portions, etc. But that's the world we live in, and as long as you are allowing one to navigate from text view to text view as you have been, I can deal with it. Brettz9 (talk) 05:59, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
I'm not a huge fan either, my ideal presentation would give much more flexibility to the user than a pdf doc, but while retaining the look and feel of the origional more than plain text. Anywa, I'm curious to see the implementation of PDF files on bahai-library, can you link me to any pages? David (talk) 09:01, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
- Although he might have other plans for them, Jonah is currently just embedding more and more PDFs along with the text, e.g., http://bahai-library.com/uhj_letters_behalf_guardian -Brettz9 (talk) 18:26, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
URL instructions[edit]
With the search box functional, do you still want all of the text explaining how to form URLs? Brettz9 (talk) 17:19, 27 August 2015 (UTC)
