Support: Starting with AutoView - Ready to contribute if necessary

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Starting with AutoView - Ready to contribute if necessary

Hi Tim,

We are really considering using extensively Autoview presenter for our Moodle based video-shaped courses.

I start to check and design a full production chain from material aquisition to video on line courses distribution.

We may involve some time in AutoView module to make it run properly in our environment (french based). I am finishing up french translations. As we have deep IT skills, we may fix some bugs and make some input for enhancing the code.

Our first demo is programmed on May the 19th at the french delegation of the UNESCO.

Would you be OK for exchanging support ?

Thanks for this great module.

Valery.

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A good french translation would be of use to us as well, my secondary school version for the interface probably isn't up to much. If you are able to contribute that back, i'll make sure it goes into the official download, along with anything else that you come up with that looks useful.

I'm happy to provide basic support through this forum and we also do paid consultancy should you need something more than this.

Note : I'm going to be on holiday (in France) from 28th march to 5th April, so you may not get any further replies from me till I get back.

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PS : Are you the Valery Fremaux of 'Global Search' fame ? If so one of my medium term tasks is to come up with some code so that global search can index the slides and possibly subtitles in AutoView. If you could help us with that then we should be able to give you more direct support (should it be required) in exchange.

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Oh, just a minute I check...

ouch, I fear I am clin d’oeil

No trouble to help you to get the global search indexing autoview instances. I don't immediately know how for slides, as semantic may be hidden in the graphics, but subtitles might not be a real problem, as long as we will be able to identify clearly contextual metadata for them and reconstruct a complete access URL for the exact viewpoint location.

Cheers from Paris and http://www.ethnoinformatique.fr.

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I have an idea that there might be a swftotxt tool in existence. If not, AutoView can be configured to accept a PDF as a printable slide source, which could be used with pdf2txt. As long as the PDF for printing and the swf for the regular presentation have the same content this should work.

PS : I'll be in Paris for a few hours this evening (friday), just passing though on the Snowtrain (travelling alone, arriving 20:50 on the Eurostar), but i'm likely to be eating at the Aux Ville du Nord opposite the Gare du Nord. Drop in an email on tmw@autotrain.org if you feel like meeting up.

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Next week should I have "official time" to try really the module, and fix the translations I made for. I will know more about its functional superficie.

If we get a free swftotext tool, it could be usable as external converter. I use already xpdf library for pdftotext conversion. I'll check if I can guess the filetype easily from the autoview data model.

Cheers.

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Hi Tim,

here are first reports about my use of the module (many questions and observations) :

Language issues :
- UTF8 issues on french files : all these issues can be fixed saving the .js files containing translations in UTF8 forced encoding.
- Problem of an unset language at module first startup (once instanciated in Moodle). I've checked the issue is in findValidLangs() does not find anything at first run. I would like the module setup the Moodle user own language as default or the course language as default default.
- French translations to be renewed (I have them)
- Some popup do not find any french language keys (editing a slide, e.g.), they are set in english.
- Problem of translation in XSL transforms (that is the start of further questions)
Bugs (or misbehaviours) :
- when entering jpg files as slides, the slide image resource address is not correctly stored in the config file. Image Urls are not correctly generated and resulting images are broken

To start checking that out, i started a bit of "code beautifying" (a way for me to study the code, and make it more "moodle cultured") and opened the blackbox. Many questions there :

What is the originating reason of using PHP->XML->XSLT->JS for generating popups (nice, but so complicated !!), just using a DOM reader from PHP could make the code much more simpler, and specially for language switching... (i mean "autoview.php")
What is the GPL side and what is the commercial proprietary side of the code ?

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I'll look at the language/bugs bit later, when i've cleared the backlog in my inbox, however to answer your two last questions :

> What is the originating reason of using PHP->XML->XSLT->JS

The XSLT (and the use of an XML config file) was chosen for a very deliberate reason, we want to able to port the AutoView module to other environments written in other languages with the minimum of effort. This means doing as little as possible in PHP and as much as possible using templates and javascript which can be moved 'as is' and used with other languages/platforms.

> What is the GPL side and what is the commercial proprietary side of the code ?

Everything in the download you have is GPL, i'm not intending to mix and match GPL and commercial code, this will cause to much confusion. Commercial extras will be a separate download when they are ready.

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Thanks Tim for all these lightenings. I known actually this strategy to implement most of code in portable XSL+JS code that allows costless integration in heterogeneous environments.

I'm starting seeking to good swf2text translators and have just applied for the Adobe Search Engine Licencing program.

It seems offering a quite nice way of implementing swf to text extractions on a simple free registration constraint. Do you know about this program and if we could use it in the Moodle context for having AutoView searchable ?

Cheers.

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I'm not aware of the Abode tool, but I would have no objection to using it for presentations which don't have a PDF slide source.

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Language issues :

UTF-8

Did you notice the files in /vresource/utils, these were written to help with translations and hopefully pick up problem characters. Perhaps you could check this out and suggest improvements. Right now it only picks up the language files for the delivery side of AutoView, not the editor. One of the things on my to do list is to get it to pick up the editor strings as well.

Unset language

Not sure what's going on here, i'll look into it when I can find some time.

Popups in English

With the exception of a few minor bits in the XSL (see below) they should all have language keys.

If they haven't then this was a mistake which needs to be fixed. Note, translations of phrases which are only used in the editor are kept in a separate language file, in avedit/lang and are not in the main language files, so if you've not translated this file then bits of the editing interface will still be in english. You'll also need to edit templates/autoview.xsl so that the system knows it has a french translation of the editor as well as the english one. Look for the line

<script type="text/javascript" src="{$aveditdir}lang/en.js">//</script>

and add a duplicate for the french translation.

XSL and Translation

Unless i've missed something, avedit/avedit.xsl and avedit/convert.xsl are the only two files which contain english phrases which might be seen by the user (I think I might have put an english title in subtitles.xsl, but nobody should ever see this, so it dosn't really matter). The convert.xsl file is intended for connection to an online document conversion service which hasn't yet been finished, so this can be ignored for now.

That leaves the 'please wait' bit in avedit.xsl. This is only here because I was finding that sometimes variations in browsers loading different bits of different frames at different speeds meant that the editor window failed to show it's functions about 20% of the time. If I can get the editor window to show reliably 100% of the time then this phrase and it's associated button can be removed.

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