This documents various stages of developing the database and the website. These records may be useful for maintainig the website.
The free font Roboto by Google is used to display Egyptian transliteration and all other textual contents in the online database. The hinted version obtainable under Releases is used, for otherwise the font looks ugly in some browsers (Firefox). The Apache License 2.0 allows modifying the font preserving its name. A subset of the font was produced by https://transfonter.org/. Only the following Unicode ranges were included: 0000-052F, 1D80-206F, 2E17, A720-A725. This includes Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Egyptian Unicode Transliteration.
To encode Egyptian transliteration, the following Unicode chars are used:
Ꜣꜣ Jj Ꜥꜥ Ww Bb Pp Ff Mm Nn Rr Hh Ḥḥ Ḫḫ H̱ẖ Ss Šš Qq Kk Gg Tt Ṯṯ Dd Ḏd ⸗ .
Bibliography is produced with citeproc-js-server using a custom CSL chicago-author-date-initials.csl. It retains the case of bibliographic descriptions (for it is impossible to properly capitalise titles when an English article appears in a non-English journal/edited volume or vice versa.
In order to produce a bibliography with citeproc-js-server, one has to generate a JSON file with all bibliographical entries and with a citations cluster including all bibliographical entries and POST it to citeproc-js-server. Sample data (forexport.json):
{"items": [{"id": "16797526", "title": "Ecritures de l'Égypte ancienne", "type": "book", "editor": [{"family": "De Meulenaere", "given": "H."}],"issued": {"date-parts": [["1992"]]},"publisher-place": "Brussels", "publisher": "Musées royaux d'art et d'histoire", "collection-title": "Guides du Département égyptien","collection-number": "7","language": "fr"}, {"id": "16796217", "title": "Sealings", "type": "chapter", "author": [{"family": "Manzo", "given": "A."},{"family": "Pirelli", "given": "R."}],"container-title": "Harbor of the pharaohs to the Land of Punt: archaeological investigations at Mersa/Wadi Gawasis, Egypt, 2001-2005", "issued": {"date-parts": [["2007"]]},"page": "232-237", "publisher-place": "Naples", "editor": [{"family": "Bard", "given": "K. A."},{"family": "Fattovich", "given": "R."}]}, {"id": "16798045", "title": "The Sealings from Marsa Gawasis (sꜣw): Preliminary Considerations on the Administration of the Port", "type": "article-journal", "author": [{"family": "Manzo", "given": "A."},{"family": "Pirelli", "given": "R."}],"container-title": "Abgadiyat", "issued": {"date-parts": [["2016"]]},"volume": "11", "page": "92-126", "language": "en"}, {"id": "16797529", "title": "The symbolic world of Egyptian amulets: from the Jacques-Édouard Berger collection", "type": "book", "author": [{"family": "Germond", "given": "P."}],"issued": {"date-parts": [["2005"]]},"publisher-place": "Milan", "publisher": "5 Continents", "language": "fr"}],"citationClusters":[{"citationItems":[{"id": "16797526", "locator": "16797526"}, {"id": "16796217", "locator": "16796217"}, {"id": "16798045", "locator": "16798045"}, {"id": "16797529", "locator": "16797529"}],"properties":{"noteIndex":1}}]}
Posting the data:
curl --header "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" --request POST --data-binary @forexport.json "http://127.0.0.1:8085/?bibliography=1&linkwrap=1&citations=1&responseformat=json&style=chicago-author-date"
The resulting JSON will contain the full bibliography; one can get shortened citations in the Author-Year style when one adds a second citation cluster to the JSON posted to citeproc-js-server.
Spellings are stored in the database as JSesh-compatible MdC codes. PNG files with transparent background are produced using JSesh-Web or a similar own-made Java program for batch producing graphical files using JSesh.