Progress!

I got in a good few hours of work this evening, and I really have some things to show for it.

I’m almost done with the stylesheet to generate the javascript BookReader files. Not having used XSLT to generate a javascript file before I wasn’t sure it would work, but it sure did. I had to set a bunch of variables, one after the other, to do things like extract the ms siglum from the file name and extract the number of pages from the last graphic tag in the facsimile section. That last one I’m particularly pleased with:

<!-- extract the number of page images from the last graphic in the facsimile section -->
<xsl:variable name="url">
    <xsl:for-each select="tei:TEI/tei:facsimile/tei:surface/tei:graphic">
        <xsl:if test="position()=last()">
            <xsl:value-of select="@url"/>
        </xsl:if>
    </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="replace-thumb" select="replace($url,'thumb','')"/>
<xsl:variable name="replace-siglum" select="replace($replace-thumb,$siglum,'')"/>
<xsl:variable name="replace-underscore" select="replace($replace-siglum,'_','')"/>
<xsl:variable name="replace-jpg" select="replace($replace-underscore,'.jpg','')"/>
<xsl:variable name="replace-slash" select="replace($replace-jpg,'/','')"/>
<xsl:variable name="page-nos" select="number($replace-slash)"/>

I expect there is a more sophisticated way to do this, but I’m just tickled that I figured it out myself.

I made good use of those variables, too, in fact every replacement I made in the javascript was done with a variable. I don’t think I’ve ever made a stylesheet constructed entirely of variables before.

The stylesheet generates a folder, named after the siglum, and the (much simpler) stylesheet I wrote for the html file does the same, and also uses the same variables (although not as many of them).

There is still work to do. For one thing, it’s not working! It’s something in the javascript, and since javascript isn’t my forte it’s going to take me a while to figure it out. I’ll probably spend some time this weekend modifying my test BookReader (the one that works) by hand, in comparison with the XSLT output, and see if I can get it to break or if I can see what’s different in the output that would cause it to break.

In any case I feel really good about what I’ve been able to get through tonight, and now I am READY FOR BED.