Index talk:The Strand Magazine (Volume 2).djvu

Starting work on Volume 2

Good morning. After what seems to have been quite a successful period working on Volume 1, that's coming to an end, so I'm starting the process of formatting the index and tables of contents of this volume in the same style. Currently Issue 7 has a formatted and linked TOC, and those for the other issues should follow in the next couple of days.

This will be going in parallel with processing all the images for this volume. Currently everything from Issue 7 is [processed and uploaded] to Wikimedia Commons, with images from the other issues to follow over the next week. Qq1122qq (talk) 11:28, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

All of the TOCs are now formatted and ready to be filled with the article pages as and when they are proofread. Qq1122qq (talk) 22:16, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

All of the images for this volume are now cropped and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, linked to from my user page. Qq1122qq (talk) 13:06, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

Formatting Notes

A lot of excellent work has been done on this volume already, and I'm not going to be hacking about at it too much, but for new pages:

Quotation Marks

The Wikisource standard is to use " and ' rather than 'smart quotes'.

Article Titles

These are normally slightly larger, centered, and italicised, and sometimes followed by the author in smallcaps.

{{c|{{larger|{{''Article title''}}}}

{{sc|By The Author}}
}}

Several other styles are used, though, including illustrated titles.

Page Headers

In general I am a fan of not over-styling these, as they are not transcluded anyway. For most of volume 1 I used

{{rvh|__page__|''__text__''}}

which has the advantage of automatically putting the page number on the correct side based on whether it is odd or even.

Dropcaps

Most of the articles use the same set of dropcap initials at the start of an article. You can access these using

{{Strand di|T}}HERE

This translates directly to

{{di|T|image=Strand Magazine - Initial T.png|imgsize=60px}}HERE

and relies on having a good example of each dropcap on Wikimedia Commons - I've found all except Q and X.

Illustrations

Most pages have illustrations. I generally format these using the img float template:

{{img float
 | file     = ____
 | width    = ____px
 | align    = ____
 | cap      = {{smaller|{{asc|____}}}}
}}

For a full-width illustration, 'width' is 500px and 'align' is center. For half-width illustrations, 'width' is generally 250px or 300px, and 'align' can be 'left', 'right', or 'center'.

'Portraits of Celebrities'

This often has a gallery of 4 or 5 images of the same person, interleaved with a little text. I generally move the heading (the name of the celebrity) to the top of the page, then put the images, and then the text. In general I have been using floats as above for the pages with a couple of images, and tables for the more complicated pages. The table part looks like this:

{| {{ts|ac|sm|ma}}  
|-
| [[File:____|240px|center|frameless]]{{smaller|{{asc|Age ___.}}}}<br/>{{x-smaller|''From ___.''}}
| [[File:____|240px|center|frameless]]{{smaller|{{asc|Age ___.}}}}<br/>{{x-smaller|''From ___.''}}
|-
| [[File:____|240px|center|frameless]]{{smaller|{{asc|Age ___.}}}}<br/>{{x-smaller|''From ___.''}}
| [[File:____|240px|center|frameless]]{{smaller|{{asc|Age ___.}}}}<br/>{{x-smaller|''From ___.''}}
|}

Note that I've 'unsplit' the photo attribution and the main caption.

• Here is an example of a simple one-row table, with a later floating image.
• Here is an example of a table with a 'double height' image which uses the 'rowspan' attribute.
• Here is an example of a 5 images, with the text placed in the bottom right of the table.

On Illustration Quality and .djvu

Many of the illustrations that people have added to this work already have been extracted from the .djvu files - sadly the processing used to make .djvu files severely degrades image quality. You can see a good example of this in the frontispiece for Issue 7 --

• Here is the image cropped from the .djvu file [[1]]
• Here is the image from original page scans [[2]]

While they are ostensibly both 400dpi, hopefully this should give a good reason not to use the .djvu versions.

As I work through this volume, I'll replace the images with what should hopefully be higher quality scans. Qq1122qq (talk) 14:28, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

@User:Qq1122qq See also H:EXTRACT for some explanation of what's going on here and some ideas of how to deal with it. But you have the right idea: start from the highest quality images you have; extraction from a DjVu or a screenshot is nearly always an absolute last ditch. Inductiveload—talk/contribs 22:30, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

The Index

For volume 1, I used lots of

{{TOC row}}

templates, plus friends, to format the index, but I was never completely happy with the formatting. For this volume, I have gone a little more low level and used the Wikitext table syntax. I think it looks a little better, but all of the 'ts' helper templates can look a little cryptic. Here's an explanation of my formatting.

The table starts like this

{| {{ts|ma}}
!
! {{ts|xs|ar}} | PAGE.

'ma' makes the table centered, while 'xs' is extra small and 'ar' is 'align right'. Annoyingly, the Wikitext markup doesn't give you access to the 'colgroup' HTML tag, so instead of setting properties for columns as a whole, you have to set them on each individual row. This means every single number column has to have the 'align right' markup.

A normal index entry is formatting like this:

|-
| ____. By {{sc|____}}
| {{ts|ar}} | ____
|-
| {{ts|pl4|sm|}} | (''Illustrations'' by {{sc|____}}.)

Various parts of this (page number, or illustrator) can be omitted if they are not in the original listing. The 'pl4' indicates the illustrator information is indented.

A sublist entry (such as a list of the various Portraits of Celebrities) is formatted as

|-
| {{ts|pl2|sc|sm}} | ____
| {{ts|ar}} | ____

i.e. indented a little, smaller, and in smallcaps.

The index has a gap between entries of different starting letters. This is done as follows:

|-
|  

And, of course, the table then finally ends:

|}

The start/end sections can be put in the various headers/footers when the tables are more than one page long, and this seems to work relatively well as long as a blank line is put before/after them -- a blank line also seems to need to appear at the start/end of the middle pages of the index. Qq1122qq (talk) 08:48, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

Initial proofreading done!

First round proofreading of this volume is now complete - on to Volume 3! Qq1122qq (talk) 10:47, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

@Qq1122qq congratulations! Inductiveload—talk/contribs 12:34, 10 September 2022 (UTC)