ProofReading Markup Language / News: Recent posts

The majority of the site is now available in German and Italian, by accessing it at the appropriate domains, http://www.prml.de/ and http://www.prml.it/. Furthermore, the canonical main English site is now http://www.prml.org/.
The main exception is the licenses page. The GNU Foundation and its GPL hold that translations of the licenses are of questionable value, so I'm still considering what I shall do there. Of course, at the same time, it's about time to update that to include the GPL 3.0 as well.... read more

I've finished converting all the HTML pages into rather simple PHP pages, without a lot of bells and whistles yet. If you find something not working or loading properly for you, please let us know.

This should enable a better solution for presenting the site in multiple languages. (On the other hand, it has just occurred to me that there may be no good solution for presenting this news feed in multiple languages.)

We now have Facebook, as you can see on the main site. And we now have several domains that all point to the same http://prml.sourceforge.net/ site for now, but will eventually have localized content: http://www.prml.net/ , http://www.prml.mobi/ , http://www.prml.de/ , and http://www.prml.it/ .

And more directly related to the matter of PRML itself, I finally have some of the books needed to make sure PRML is everything it needs to be. While I will be busy reading those for a time, more books are always welcome! See the Amazon wishlist for more.

Well, it's not really that bad. But during a recent trip to the library, I found and checked out a book specifically about "software project management". If only I'd read it two or so years ago! Well, it was published in 2006, so that wouldn't have been easy.
So, I'm currently reading it, and hopefully it will have some good advice in it to help keep this project on track. I'll see if anything results in a dramatic change to the currently expected roadmap and other plans.

Well, this was a rather longer hiatus this time. Non-Internet life dragged me away for a time. But in the meantime, I've still been tweaking the basics of PRML in my mind, if not on my computer. The most significant outcome of this contemplation is that PRML really needs to become modular, much like the latest XHTML is.
But not just because it's the "latest & greatest," and XHTML is doing it. After considering how PRML will interact with documents in various formats and programs, it seems absolutely necessary that it be modular, so that e.g. a plugin for Adobe InDesign doesn't waste its time (and possibly confuse itself) trying to load up the markup specific to an HTML document.
I'm currently working up the XSDs and DTDs to reflect this modular structure. They should be uploaded fairly soon, and some general description of the module structure may be available on the Documentation page sooner than that.

I've been having a diversion while converting a friend's antique into my server, and with that hardware, it's being an interesting (and lengthy) job. But once it's done, I'll be much freer to use my workstation for testing & development, since it won't have to stay in Linux all the time lest I miss some e-mail or web serving. Once that's done, I'll be focusing on the DTDs etc., and just live with the fact that Perameles is terribly borked for a while.
Manwhile, though, some good news: Although the gtkperl.org website is still defunct, with the release of Fedora Core 4 and its new Extras, I've found that Gtk-Perl is back in the system, although not in the default install. Once things settle down, I'll probably either make sure it's completely obvious how to get the package on your system, or write up just what to do.

PRML is aimed at creating a ProofReading Markup Language, since I haven't found anything quite suited to the purpose out there on the 'Net, using XML DTDs and/or schema, and/or XHTML 1.1 modules. This Markup Language would strive to accurately convey any possible imperfections in a printed work (possibly expanded later to include online HTML and such, if there's a demand for it) in a way that makes it clear to printsetters exactly what needs to be fixed, and why. Building on this, a Perl/GTK reference implementation will be programmed, with a PHP/SQL interface to follow.
The initial reference implementation, tentatively named "Proximal" at this point, will be a Perl/GTK program, able to run on typical Linux/*BSD/Mac OSX machines without needing extra libraries or packages. (That's changed since Fedora Core 3, at least, no longer includes Gtk-Perl by default.) It will read a local *.prml file, a http://example.com/sample.prml file over a network, or use a MySQL database which stores author, volume, division, page, and line info. It will display either the version as seen on the printed page, the corrected version of that same region, or both side by side. It will allow the file to be edited to add or remove markup, indicating errors found or already corrected, and save the information back to a local file or the MySQL database.... read more