Italics, superscript availability to authors for metadata

[jayfitzsimmons]

Dear OJS developers,

I am in the process of transitioning our journal from print-only to print+OJS. Thank you very much for OJS - it seems like it will be just what we need. I have two related suggestions on improvements to OJS. I was reluctant to submit a bug report for them because they are not bugs but suggestions for improvement.

1. Allow authors to italicize words in the title, during step 2 of their submission process. I know that html tags including <em> can be used in the title field, and I have been using them successfully for articles I'm uploading. But naive authors won't know this. Our journal is a biological journal, so the majority of titles have species' names that must be italicized. It will be a pain in the butt for editors to add <em> tags to every article's title. I suggest it would be better if the italics button underneath the abstract box could also be used to italicize highlighted words in the title field. Or, if that's not possible, then an additional italics box (along with bold and the other buttons) could be added just for the title field.

2. Allow authors to superscript and subscript words in their abstract. Html tags <sup> and <sub> are allowed in the abstract field, but authors won't know about them and are often not web-savvy enough to know what an html tag is. It would be easier if there were two extra buttons added to the clickable boxes underneath the abstract field for superscript and subscript, just like the existing buttons for bold, italics, etc. Many of the abstracts in my journal require superscripts (e.g., km-square). Few require subscripts for my journal, but I'd assume chemistry journals would benefit from subscripts.

Thank you for hosting this forum - it's useful to people like me who are learning the OJS system.
Jay Fitzsimmons
The Canadian Field-Naturalist

[jmacgreg]

Hi Jay,

Thanks for the kind words, as well as the constructive comments! We're always happy to hear from users, and we appreciate new feature requests.

Regarding the first request: I'm a little hesitant to go along with this one, as adding TinyMCE options would add a fair bit of clutter to the interface, and I think people are accustomed to not necessarily being able to edit title fields in that way. It's also something that might be best left until copyediting. That said, if you could possibly point to other web forms where titles are handled better; or perhaps if there are others who think this is a good idea, we could definitely consider adding it.

Regarding the second request: I've added this to bugzilla as a feature request here: http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5882. Please feel free to CC yourself to that report for future updates. And thanks again for the comments!

Cheers,
James

[jmacgreg]

Hi Jay,

As mentioned in that bug report, we're not going to do this until OJS 2.3.4. But if you want to make the change in your own install, you can open the file plugins/generic/tinymce/TinyMCEPlugin.inc.php, and find the following line:

Code: Select all

theme_advanced_buttons1 : "cut,copy,paste,|,bold,italic,underline,bullist,numlist,|,link,unlink,help,code,fullscreen,ibrowser",

(... or something similar ...) and add "sub,sup" where appropriate. You will want to test the change by loading a few pages that have TinyMCE fields enabled.

Cheers,
James

[jayfitzsimmons]

Thanks James, for starting the bug submission and telling me how to fix this for my OJS system. I appreciate your help.
Jay

[daskey]

Regarding the first request: I'm a little hesitant to go along with this one, as adding TinyMCE options would add a fair bit of clutter to the interface, and I think people are accustomed to not necessarily being able to edit title fields in that way. It's also something that might be best left until copyediting. That said, if you could possibly point to other web forms where titles are handled better; or perhaps if there are others who think this is a good idea, we could definitely consider adding it.

I'll chime in here as someone who would like to see the option for title formatting. Particularly for reviews, where a title often appears within a title and needs to be italicized, this would be quite useful. Also, given how much humanities scholars in particular like to play with text formatting to underscore points or little ironic puns, it would be nice to be able to support that. It would clutter the interface a bit, and having it in the submission process might tempt people to format a title just because, but having it available for editors would be great.

Best regards,
Dale

[vgabler]

Hi, All,

I agree with Dale that italics in the titles for many humanities journals are common. Also, book reviews and errata often include them as well because they often reference an earlier article. We are running multiple journals on various versions, and as yet I don't see a way to include italics in titles. Using tagging like <ital></ital> is not feasible because it corrupts the metadata. The "how to cite" function will display improperly as well.

All best,
Vanessa Gabler

[jmacgreg]

Hi Vanessa,

You should currently be able to manually write in either <em>...</em> or <i>...</i> for italics in titles, although as stated above, your authors probably won't know how to do that. Since this original thread started, we've started some work to add TinyMCE to single-line fields, including the title field. Please feel free to CC yourself to that report for future updates; and if you are able to test the attached patches and report back on how they work, we'd appreciate it.

Cheers,
James