[Sca-cooks] Serena's Norman-Sicilian feast article

Stefan li Rous StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
Tue Oct 24 23:00:34 PDT 2006


Serena da Riva commented:
<<<
 > There's an interesting article in the Florilegium about 12th-century
 > Sicilian food.  Sicily is sor of Italian (not so much in the 12th-
 > century
 > as much as tody, hence the soft of).  Maybe that will help.

Greetings,

I am guessing that this might be in reference to the article I wrote.
Here is a link to a PDF version of the document:
http://tinyurl.com/aj2at  >>>

This is the article.

Nrmn-Scly-Fst-art (64K)  7/10/06    “A feast based upon the culture  
of Norman
                                        Sicily during the reign of  
King Roger II”
                                        by Donna Serena da Riva.  
(12th Century)
http://www.florilegium.org/files/FEASTS/Nrmn-Scly-Fst-art.html

  <<< There were some issues in the conversion from PDF to the  
Florithingie
format - my fault for sending the PDF in the first place. This one
might be easier to read.  >>>

Oops. My apologies. I'm afraid that I edited and then got this online  
without taking a careful look at the resulting file after processing  
it into HTML code.  I went and looked at the file after seeing your  
comments and found that there were indeed a number of problems.

Serena, I got the file from you in a Word format. However, you had  
copied a section from another website, which would have been fine,  
but it had a bunch of hidden URLs encoded into the footnotes and when  
I processed the file into HTML they suddenly became visible. And  
converting the footnotes into simple text, which is something I  
usually do, but didn't in this case because I didn't see that they  
were footnotes, still didn't get rid of all the garbage because there  
was HTML code hidden within the text of the paragraph itself.

Also, a bunch of the quotes and single quotes came across as the  
Microsoft "smart quotes", which most HTML readers don't understand.  
Then there were several of the single character Microsoft fractions  
which also don't translate into HTML well and things like the degree  
sign.

So, I've fixed most of these problems and updated the improved  
version to the website. I think some of the other special characters  
such as foreign characters with accents and such may still be  
problems, although it may depend upon how you have your fonts set up  
in your browser.

I did find a way to change the "smart" quotes back to normal text and  
will try to remember to run that procedure across future Florilegium  
files and/or modify my processing program to make this change. I also  
will have to reconsider how I handle and choose the fonts used in the  
Florilegium.  Recently I discovered that the Courier font, which I  
prefer to the Courier New font may not be handled as well on the  
newer Microsoft operating systems as it was on the older systems or  
on the Mac. Documents I've read imply that Courier font characters  
are always displayed at 10 pts and don't scale. But it may be that on  
Windows systems another font gets substituted.  Since my Windows  
system isn't working, this makes testing some of this difficult right  
now.

There are some advantages to simply posting only PDF files to the  
website, since a lot of these font and formatting problems wouldn't  
occur. But if I did so, people couldn't download the files and copy  
pieces out of them, such as a recipe.

Stefan
--------
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
    Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas           
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****




More information about the Sca-cooks mailing list