TmiWeb User Manual

Contents

Version 0.4, 5 Februari 2005

Setting up your computer

TmiWeb has been developed for Netscape 4-7 on Windows operating systems. This is the optimum configuration. TmiWeb is also regularly tested for Internet Explorer 5-6. As a web application, TmiWeb can be consulted from many platforms, though with some loss of functionality. We keep trying to make TmiWeb truly platform-independent.

What you need to do before using TmiWeb:

• set browser preferences
• install two special fonts

Browsers preferences

DynaWeb, TmiWeb's software environment, expects your browser to be able Javascript-enabled and to support cookies. Almost all web browsers support these features, but they may have been switched off. For optimum functionality switch them on. Also, make sure document-specified fonts are enabled.

When using Internet Explorer 5, the Greek font (see below) is displayed only in part for unknown reasons.

Fonts

The default font for TmiWeb is whatever your own web browser specifies. You don't have to change this font. I am now using two different fonts in alternation, "Times New Roman" and "Verdana", with a slight preference for the latter.

TmiWeb employs two additional fonts, one for Classical Greek, and another for music symbols. If you have installed the TMI CD-ROM volume 1, these will already be available. If you haven't, and you can download these fonts from the Internet:

• WinGreek is a shareware Greek font for the PC (download here). Unzip the file and install the font file called "Greek.TTF".
• "TemporaryMusic" is a font containing some symbols from 16th century mensural notation. Download, unzip and install it.

Note that these are both True Type fonts for Windows. There may be alternatives for other platforms: please inform me about these!

Using TmiWeb

In this section, only part of the DynaWeb interface is described. The DynaWeb Client Guide provides a complete overview of the DynaWeb interface and search language: read this if you want detailed information about using DynaWeb.

Collections

Documents on the DynaWeb server are ordered in collections and subcollections. The collections are:

• Italian Music Treatises, divided alphabetically into subcollections of treatises
• Documents outside TMI, divided alphabetically into subcollections of link files
• Secondary materials, with (currently) one collection, Names and biographies. It contains three documents:
  • Personal names, containing descriptions of all persons whose names are marked up in TmiWeb with search links to the treatises;
  • two biographical sources.
• DynaWeb Client Documentation

Navigation

DynaWeb splits the browser window into three frames:

1. on the left, a table of contents, or a Collection List
2. on the right, the document text, or the content of a collection (Book List, Subcollection List)
3. at the bottom, a number of buttons and a search form

Generally, clicking an item in the left frame will bring up its contents in the right frame. Documents are thus not displayed in their entirety, but split up into fragments corresponding to items in the Table of Contents.

Some of the icons in the bottom frame can be used for navigation:

	Go to TmiWeb Home Page
	Go to the Collection List
	Go to Book List of current collection
	Expand the Table of Contents or Collection List one level
	Collapse the Table of Contents or Collection List one level

I you do not want to use frames, you may switch to "Deactivate frames mode" by clicking , and back to frames by clicking .

Icons

There are two sorts of icons in TmiWeb:

1. Toolbar icons. Most of these have already been discussed above. If you click the Help icon, , you will be shown a list of these icons.
2. Document icons:

   	Sound
   	Illustration
   	Page break (possibly with link to a facsimile page)
   	Marginal note
   	Internal link
   	External link
   	Anchor (sometimes used as end point for external links)
   	TmiWeb search (see below)
   	Cross-reference search (see below)

Colors

Document text is shown using a number of colors to indicate special sorts of information:

Hyperlinks

TmiWeb is heavily hyperlinked. The most important hyperlink categories are:

• internal references (tables of contents, indexes, cross references)
• external references (to works within and outside the TMI corpus)
• personal names (linking to the Personal names document)

Links in the documents have the usual layout (in any case, they are underlined if you didn't send your browser preferences differently) and can be followed as in any other web page. In addition, there are special search types which are in fact hyperlinks in reverse (see below).

For documents outside the TMI corpus, a collection of link files is being produced. These files contain basic metadata and a table of contents of the outside document. If electronic versions of the document are known, these are listed and links are provided. Usually, the "granularity" of markup is rather coarse, and links appear only at the top of the table.

Here are two examples of how link files are used.

1. In his Compendiolo, book 1, chapter 2, Aaron cites his own Institutione harmonica, book 1, chapter 2, a Latin work outside TMI. This citation is a hyperlink to the link file, which displays the following table:
   
   
   
   In this table, hyperlink are shown for each chapter. Clicking the link for chapter 2 opens this file (from the Thesaurus musicarum latinarum) at the specified chapter.
2. In the Lucidario, Aaron cites Boethius's De institutione musica a number of times. One citation, to book 1, chapter 11, occurs in book 2, chapter 8, ressolutione. If you follow the link, the following table appears:
   
   
   
   There are thus no specific links to the chapter in question. Instead, in the top row of the table, three hyperlinks to electronic sources are shown for the entire book.

Stylesheets

Stylesheets can be used to display documents in different manners. There are two sorts of style sheets:

1. TOC Stylesheets, which determine what sort of table is displayed in the frame on the left
2. Content Stylesheets, which determine how the content of the document is displayed in the frame on the right

To change the stylesheet, go to the Dynaweb Preferences: the icon displays these. The settings are personal, though you can always restore the default settings by clicking the "Apply Defaults" button an then "OK". Global Preferences seem to be preserved between sessions, Book Level Preferences are discarded.

The following Content stylesheets are available for all treatises except Aaron's and Del Lago's:

The following TOC stylesheets are available for all documents except Aaron's Toscanello:

Note that the "default" and "Standard Dynaweb View" sheets are identical (why there are two names is a mystery).

Stylesheets for specific sources

The following Content stylesheets are available for Del Lago and Aaron's treatises (except Toscanello):

The following stylesheets are available for Aaron's Toscanello:

Stylesheets corresponding to versions 2 and 3 of Aaron's other treatises will be supplied.

Examples and illustrations

In the default and basic views, illustrations and music examples may be shown at reduced size to fit the screen. Clicking an illustration opens a new window showing the full-size illustration.

Searching

Simple searching is very easy. Just enter a word or phrase in the seach field in the bottom frame and press the "Search" button. Only complete words are found. You can search for strings by means of wildcards: for these and kinds of advanced searches see the DynaWeb Client Guide, chapter 4.

The scope of the search depends on what is displayed in the left frame.

• If the left frame is a list of collections and none of these is selected, all collections are searched.
• If one collection in the left frame is selected, this collection is searched. If you want to search the other collections as well, select the "All Collections" checkbox.
• If the left frame is the contents of a document, only the document is searched.

After the search, the number of hits in each item will be shown in the tables, and in the document itself each hit is shown in a red, big font. Some icons in the bottom frame are related to searching:

	Display next pages with search hits
	Display previous page with search hits
	Clear search (normal fonts will be restored)

Searches can be "expanded", that is, word forms, synonyms, and related terms are included in the output. To use this option, click the check box "Expand Search". A good example is to search for musica, which also finds words like musico, musici and musiche.

You can search markup, for example by entering a tag name in the search field. Here is what happens when all <persname> tags are searched.

Special searches

• TMI search. When an item is preceded by one of the TMI search icons ( or ), you can search all treatises for references to this particular item, for example:
  1. In the Personal Names file, a TMI search icon appears before each name. Clicking this icon starts a search for all occurrences of this name in the Italian Music Treatises collection. (Try here!)
  2. When appearing at the top of a work in the Italian Music Treatises and Documents outside TMI collections, this icon starts a seach for references to this work in the treatises. For example, clicking this icon in Boethius's De institutione musica (here) generates the following list of hits:
     
     
     
     
  3. When appearing before a division title, the TMI Search icon generates a list of references to this particular division. Don't be surprised if the number of hits is low or zero. Note that only references to precisely this division are found, and not to its subdivisions. SGML experts: this is because references to the division ID are searched.
• Cross-reference search. This type of search is indicated by the icon after a division title. Clicking this icon produces a list of cross-references to this particular division within the current document. This type of seach is in fact a backward internal link.