100 graphics are now in the SVG repository! We’re building out more components for the illustrations and creating these graphics is becoming much easier. We started work on a symbol set this week and updated the look to match some of the standard icon sets such as the passenger/pedestrian set developed by AIGA and released into the public domain.

Symbols for Title 24 “vectorized” by the SVG Team at #rdcHQ

“Copy Right” by
Gerd Arntz <3

This collection led us to The Noun Project which contains a wealth of useful pictograms (and this, in turn, led us to the first ever ICONATHON being held today in San Francisco). When working on a project of this nature, it always makes sense to conduct research to see if there are similar efforts that can be built upon or may benefit from the end result of your own project. That’s why attribution is key to build links between these projects so interested people are aware of their co-existence. Attribution is what makes the Web world-wide. Without attribution and contextual hyperlinking meaning is lost and authorship is obscured. You never know what serendipitous discoveries you will make!

Production-Ready Art

The Scalable Vector Graphic format that we are using is moving this document set into the modern era. It is not difficult to spot the difference in quality between the original art we are working from and the resolution-independent vector files we are producing (you can view two examples side-by-side here). The new files will be reusable in web and print applications, and ready for use in the next wave of interactive and mobile applications. This adds value and improves accessibility for anyone using this document set and not just for a subset of people. That’s cool! Our art is production-ready and released freely into the public domain – they are designed to “copy right” in more ways than one!

Greetings from #rdcHQ! We made great progress yesterday building out the navigation on our “VERY ALPHA” website! Jenn successfully created secondary and tertiary navigation options using the “Pages” and “Menu” controls in WordPress and the “Theme Skinning” capabilities of Suffusion:

Suffusion/WordPress navigational goodness by Jenn Covington

We weren’t sure this would be possible without modifying the underlying template code, but we only had to make one small change to the template CSS file in order to keep the text from wrapping on the menu options. We’ll release this code as a patch along with the tutorials we create for our project. The goal is to make minimal changes to any theme files to simplify the upgrade path. We want new menu items to be easy to add and software upgrades to be painless for New Artists Productions. We still have a few stylistic changes to make to the navigation, but now the architecture is in place and we can start building out the site.

We started the first phase of adding more content to the Scrapbook area of the site. The Newspaper Articles section now contains many more stories about the group (see below), and we have added a section of cast photos highlighting the various performances by the group over the years.

We are waiting on one last derive from the Internet Archive of the Poster History section – we’ve added quite a bit of content including stories behind the set designs, site sketches and letters of appreciation from participants in the program. We will add these to our “VERY ALPHA” site in progress as soon as the build is complete and the files are available.

We’ll be working on the next round of content for the site. Everything is really starting to come together and we’ll be rolling out the site at our Rural Design Collective Launch Party over Labor Day Weekend! Stay tuned!

Groovy “VERY ALPHA” Stage mockup by Oceana Fields

Our resident videographer, Nate Malamud, has extended his movie release date until August 17 to give himself more time to perfect his final work. We’re arranging to get some better audio equipment at #rdcHQ, and will release the movie in episodes up until the Rural Design Collective Launch Party which takes place on Labor Day Weekend. In the meantime, he created a new trailer for our Kickstarter fundraising campaign using some of the frames from our stage animation for the New Artists Production website.

More news coming up from Hacker Wednesday – Stay Tuned!

Greetings from #rdcHQ! This week in the MathML Track we successfully converted the majority of the equations Jasper has authored from MathML to SVG using SVGMath! 239 equations were transformed using our modified version of the program. You can view these conversions in Jasper’s Sandbox

The original MathML equations are on the left; the SVG conversions are on the right. We are definitely pleased with this latest development, as the converted SVGs provide a localized solution for our document set (i.e. one that does not rely on JavaScript or an external CDN for delivery). MathJax does provide an excellent solution for cross-browser rendering for equations written in MathML, and its capability to work with screen readers in order to audibly render the equations makes it the perfect solution for many applications. More on this and Content MathML next week.

Typographic Nits

There are subtle typographic variations between the MathML and SVG renditions which can be resolved by fine-tuning the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The MathML character set in combination with CSS provides a high degree of control over the elements. The Default CSS style sheet published by the W3C is an excellent starting point for providing an understanding of the level of granularity.

While researching rendering subtleties, we discovered some useful information. MathJax will use STIX fonts for rendering if they are installed, which is what our examples in SVGMath are using. STIX fonts are recommended by MathJax as it speeds processing (preferences are set using the HTML-CSS output processor) and these fonts are beginning to be native in operating systems, such as Apple’s OSX Lion. As time permits, we hope to resolve some of these typographic nuances, however we are not sure this will make our “Alpha Release”.

SVGMath did encounter encoding errors with three glyphs in the mathematical font set (Glyph U+2211, Glyph U+2207, Glyph U+2032) which affected 20 of the equations. We are looking into this in greater depth to prepare for the next batch conversion. For now, we just like looking at the typographical symbols:

(Glyph U+2032) PRIME

(Glyph U+2211) N-ARY SUMMATION

(Glyph U+2207) NABLA

One final note: It was most efficient to process the equations as .xml files using SVGMath. We used the W3C ENTITIES HTML MathML Set to convert the HTML5 numeric form over the named form in order to successfully convert the XML files.

One more final note: we would be remiss not to mention the excellent contributions we are receiving from our special guest mystery coder, @TXT. We’ll be adding these to our conversion queue soon!

More from the MathML Track next week!