EPPT

= Edition Production &amp; Presentation Technology (EPPT)=

EPPT (http://www.eppt.org/eppt-trial/EPPT-TrialProjects.htm) is a software platform designed to help editors prepare and display image-based XML-encoded electronic scholarly editions. EPPT uses electronic text, DTDs, and digital facsimiles (JPG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, etc.) to produce highly complex encoding of image-based textual resources. EPPT supports any DTD-based encoding schema (such as the TEI P4 DTDs – with support for P5 XML Schema and RelaxNG currently under development) and enables precise, semi-automatic linking of full images as well as image sections with structural and descriptive metadata. EPPT includes new technologies and extensions (such as support for multiple hierarchies) to provide a powerful user interface for leveraging XML technologies in the production of image-based XML-encoded electronic editions.

Main features of EPPT

 * Starts new projects quickly through a project wizard
 * Customizes different projects using different schemas
 * Carries the data management burden (XML syntax, well-formedness, etc.), allowing the editor to focus on the content, and how and where to encode it
 * Provides simple user interfaces to link images and text through markup:
 * Select text
 * Select corresponding section of image
 * Select element from DTD-sensitive interface which opens an element-specific template
 * Fill in desired attribute values
 * Click “Tag it!”
 * Uses templates to reduce errors, ensuring comprehensive insertion of markup, and acceleration and, in some cases, automation of the insertion of repetitive attribute values
 * Offers easy navigation of text, metadata, and images
 * Supports multiple XML hierarchies in the same project with serialization in XML using "milestones" and "fragmentation” (as described in the TEI guidelines)
 * Allows grouping of tags into semantically related markup categories for easier project management, collaborative editing, distribution of effort, etc.
 * Integrates XSL and generates HTML presentations
 * Provides an API (with examples) to link HTML presentations (through XSLT) with project images and text, extracted and displayed from markup
 * Furnishes individual views of text content and its markup, and filters for both, to help the editor focus on particular content or markup as the encoding grows
 * Operates on XML and produces non-proprietary XML completely portable to other applications
 * Can extract rectangular sections of images to be used in HTML presentations based on image X/Y coordinates stored in the markup
 * Includes a customizable search interface with an XQuery search engine

ImagText
ImagText, the default user interface of EPPT, is responsible for both image data management (e.g., finding and opening image files associated with a project) and user image-interface interaction. The tool provides the usual image manipulation toolbox: zoom, magnification, horizontal or vertical display of one or two images, etc.

ImagText supports image area selection and, provided the @coords has been included in the content model for the selected element in the DTD, automatically inserts the X/Y coordinates of an image or image area into the markup. ImagText can also extract sections of an image based on the coordinates’ data in the markup. This feature is particularly applicable to the creation of dynamic HTML presentations enhanced with these image fragments without the need to create the image fragments manually in advance.

Overlay
Multiple images of the same manuscript folio or book page, each captured under different lighting conditions, may reveal details otherwise not visible in a single image (such as different layers of a painting). The EPPT OverLay tool creates a single image from two overlaid images for comparing and encoding multiple images of a folio or page. The tool includes a slider which changes the transparency of the top image, thereby making the bottom image gradually visible. Overlaying two images is a simple process. The user selects a pair of points for each image; OverLay then automatically scales the images until the selected pair of points from both images coincides to create the resulting overlaid image. OverLay enhances image-based electronic editions in at least two ways:

i. Overlay allows comparison of multiple images of the same object. For example, when studying images of a palimpsest captured under different lighting conditions, such as bright daylight and ultraviolet fluorescence, Overlay allows the editor to compare and contrast the readable text in one or both images simply by selecting a portion of the overlaid image and moving the slider.

ii. Overlay allows encoding image-text correspondence for one reference image; the other images of the same object are then "scaled" to the reference image so that all related image-text correspondences are accurate.

An overlaid image can be saved and attached to a project, thus automatically remaining available for future encoding.

xTagger
xTagger is a document-centric XML editor with built-in options to display or hide XML syntax from the user. In xTagger, markup is inserted by first selecting the text, then adding element and attribute information through a template interface called xMarkup. The editor focuses on how and where to encode, leaving the burden of XML syntax correctness to xTagger.

The following is a list of most important features of xTagger:


 * Provides content-only and/or XML-view of the edition
 * Allows the editor to define filters for hiding text and/or markup, useful for complex projects including textual variants, editorial emendations and annotations, expansion of abbreviations, etc.
 * Supports XML markup search and text search
 * Includes configurable tool tip information, formatted in HTML, which facilitates quick viewing of metadata simply by moving the mouse pointer
 * Provides links from text to its corresponding image via the @coords X/Y coordinates
 * Supports integration of multiple XML hierarchies (i.e., more than one XML schema can be associated with a project) through XML serialization using milestones and fragmentation

xMarkup
xMarkup comprises multiple templates – one for each element in the DTD(s) associated with a project – which support quick encoding of text and semi-automatic linking of images and text. Each template includes all the attributes associated with an element and when applicable, a list of all enumerated values associated with a specific attribute. xMarkup also supports customization of markup hierarchies and association of aliases to elements (e.g., line for ) to simplify markup for novice text encoders. xMarkup can be used not only for inserting markup, but for editing and/or deleting markup as well.

HttpServer
HttpServer is a lightweight HTTP server implemented in EPPT to support HTML presentation of XML data. For instance, HTML pages displayed in EPPT can request image fragments from ImagText, based on image fragment coordinates stored in the XML markup as the value of the @coords. The tool is extremely useful in editorial work as it facilitates dynamic transformation of an XML-encoded edition into an HTML presentation with integrated images and text. An editor can view the images and text in HTML, then seamlessly return to the project view to make corrections and/or revisions to the markup.

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Image-Catalog
An important feature of image-text linking in EPPT is the decoupling of image identifiers that appear in the markup (e.g., &lt;div n=“f123v”&gt;) from the actual image file names (e.g., “f123v.jpg”). To facilitate this, EPPT uses an image file indexer called the image-catalog. The image-catalog maintains correspondence between the image identifiers used in the markup and actual image files, and determines whether or not a given image file belongs to a project. For example, a project may include multiple images of the same folio or page, such as images captured under different lighting conditions. In such cases, both images will have a single identifier in the markup: the user simply decides which specific image of that page or folio to display.

Additional Tools
Other tools provided in EPPT include:


 * DucType
 * Glossary Tool
 * StaTend
 * Quires