Today was Hacker Wednesday at #rdcHQ and the very big news is that we have a visual look and feel for the New Artists Productions website! After a few design iterations, a dash of vector stock imagery, and a little design magic, the team came up with a visual look that evokes a dramatic sense of theater:

Oceana will be working with the image above to create the animated stage visualized in her earlier sketch. Jenn and Anita will be working with the layout below to bring the WordPress website to life.

We are very excited with the direction and are now focused on the technical details to make our design a reality! We touched on social media integration during the session, and are in the process of determining which solutions make the most sense for New Artists Productions. We are also sorting through the available Wordpress widgets and Jetpack add-ons to see which ones are right for the site.

This week in the MathML Track, we’re learning all about Presentation Elements by working with the code, which is the best way to learn how to do it!

Jasper has authored 243 equations which are now viewable in our repository – and powered by MathJax, so they render in any browser. However, if you are using Safari, you will encounter a few encoding errors like the ones below:

These are MathML elements that can be coded in Amaya and recognized by many equation editors, but not currently recognized by every browser. Since our final equations will be used in a web environment, the XML entity should be used:

<!ENTITY InvisibleTimes   "&#x02062;" ><!--INVISIBLE TIMES -->

A list of these entities is maintained by the W3C along with visual reference of many of the Unicode characters. It is worth noting that these groupings correspond to to the glyph menus in Inkscape (which is the tool we are using in our SVG Track), which illustrates how useful and interoperable open source tools can be when they conform to web standards.

At this point, we are more than halfway through the equations and are now thinking about some visuals that will help our documentation effort, as well as distill some of the dense concepts in the W3C specification. Stay tuned!

Busy days at #rdcHQ! This week in the SVG Track, we began work on Dimensional Diagrams and the team is building a simple library of symbols and repeatable elements that occur frequently in the Title 24 illustration set. For now, it includes simple items such as fractions and stylized arrowheads.

We are also searching to see if any useful libraries already exist, such as the collection of electrical symbols on Wikipedia shown below. We will be moving towards similar useful groupings in the weeks ahead and will be creating more libraries like this:

We also encountered two new techniques in Inkscape that are related the the Union technique, but necessary if the shapes created by the paths need to be shaded or filled with a color. The first is Path → Break Apart:

Once this has been applied, the interior paths are separate editable shapes. If a transparent background is required for the rest of the illustration, that can be accomplished with the Path → Exclude command:

Greetings from #rdcHQ! We had a very productive Hacker Wednesday today with the addition of a new Junior Member to our team (to be announced) and a VIP guest appearance by Dan Almich to provide the graphics team with professional direction and their first on-site client meeting. Oceana met with Dan and they discussed the sketch that she presented last week. They also reviewed a new site map that further refines the sections of the site:

We also began working on the NAP Poster History which will be a major section of the site. We uploaded an image container PDF to the Internet Archive containing high-resolution TIFFs of most of the posters, and are working on text to accompany the visuals – we think it will tell a compelling story of the history of New Artists Productions:

The Internet Archive Bookreader can also be viewed in a two-page format which is well suited to our idea for presenting the text alongside the poster designs. We will be using the same format for historical news clippings as well -

Another nifty feature of uploading content to the Internet Archive is that the site automatically “derives” alternative formats from our uploaded PDF file, improving accessibility by making the content available in formats like EPUB, Kindle, Daisy and Full Text.

We also made quite a bit of progress in Suffusion, and began work on the
sandbox version of our site. Please note, this is not final and is for purposes of instruction only. It will change over the coming weeks as we continue to build the site and finalize the design. This week, we covered how to build pulldown menus using WordPress pages and change parameters such as the color of these menu items in Suffusion.

We’ll be building a series of tutorials to support New Artists Productions in the transition of the site. This will include much of the material that we are covering during Hacker Wednesdays – such as the intricacies of Suffusion and how to effectively manage content on the Internet Archive. Rather than post these in the form of weekly updates, this content will be made available in its entirety at the #rdcHQ website post-program.