Index talk:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu

Volume 3 Progress

 * Index split into individual issues ✅
 * TOCs for each issue created ✅
 * Illustrations for each issue cropped and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons ✅ - see https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Qq1122qq

The volume is now at the stage where it can be productively proofread. Qq1122qq (talk) 08:44, 11 September 2022 (UTC)


 * All 'normal' pages have now been proofread and formatted - only the Index and the two pieces of music to go, then on to Volume 4! Qq1122qq (talk) 20:32, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Formatting
The formatting we used for Volume 2 seemed to work well. Generally the only painful parts are the 'Portraits of Celebrities' and the 'Index'. Here are the notes from Volume 2 - at some point this may well be better off being placed in a Portal.

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. 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 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. For simple cases you can access these using

and for more complex cases (floating quotation marks, etc.) you can use the more comprehensive standard 'di' template:

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

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'. We are not trying to exactly replicate the page image, so the easy option for these is just to center them, and not worry about how the text flows around the image - it can always be improved in the future!

'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:

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.

The Index
Indices are always a pain to format. For the moment, I'm using the Wikitext table syntax plus the 'ts' template, which can look a little cryptic. See The Strand Magazine/Volume 2/Index for the final result.

The table starts like this '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 formatted like this: 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 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 are 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) 10:05, 11 September 2022 (UTC)