"Spanish Gribeauval in SOJ-4" Topic

Dear All
I have put together a series of papers on the Spanish Gribeauval System. This certainly underlines the reason for the French in the Peninsula keeping the old calibres of 4- and 8-pdr when they were replaced by c1808 in the rest of Europe.

The Spanish Horse Artillery is certainly a very interesting story that will hopefully be developed by others.

PDF link
Stephen

Superb!
Many thanks!

Thanks Stephen, much appreciated. I will enjoy working my way through this.

An add for adobe?

It is also interesting to speculate whether the French bothered to repaint the captured Gribeauval guns.

The main problem with Spanish ordnance was a lack of horses and mules. The latter were used mainly as draft horses were rare in Spain.

It should also be noted that in 1808, the best parts of the army were in Northern Germany with Romana or as part of the occupation of Portugal. In 1808, the Spanish Regular Army fought quite well. Baylen being the pinacle of their acheivement but also the defences of various towns.

Stephen

Interesting topic- thanks very much
Cheers
Thomas

Dear Dr. Summerfield,

I do not know if the following results from your choice as editor, the choice of your web-hosts at the Napoleon-Series , or perhaps your publisher. However, the link to the on-line version of the recent edition of the SOJ shows that it is available only in Adobe Portfolio format.

Adobe Portfolio format is a propreitary "wrapper" format for a group of .pdf files. To use the Adobe Portfolio format requires a registered version of Adobe Acrobat Reader at version 9 or above. This presents a few issues.

1. System Requirements
The Adobe system requirements for this software are shown here link
You will note that Windows systems at Win 2000 or older are not supported, Mac systems at Mac 10.3 and older are not supported. The currently shipping Mac 10.7 is not supported. Only a few *nix flavors are supported. Only the native browsers and the Firefox browser are supported (and the latest versions of Firefox are not suppported). Only a limited list of international localizations are supported. No operating systems for mobile devices (smartphones, PDA's, iPAd, eBook readers, etc.) are supported.
This compares to the essentially absolute cross-platform capability of the underlying .pdf format.

2. Adobe Registration
While the Adobe Reader software is distributed without direct cost to the user, registration of the software is required. This includes agreement to various Adobe terms and conditions that, in essence, trade privacy of personal information for access to the Adobe Reader software.

3. Unnecessary Use of Client Resources
While the use of proprietary Adobe software, with the limitations as noted above, might be reasonable if there was a specific need for the software, there is no essential need to package the .pdf files with the SOJ articels in a "wrapper". It would give the clients (your readers) the ability to select and freely access only the specific articles of interest to them if there were no "wrapper". This could be done with any browser and with any operating system on any device. It is thus poor practise to ask the readers to download and operate addtional software.

Thank you for your consideration of this topic, or your referral of these comments to the correct party.

Dear Seroga
Thank you for your comments that I had not considered. The task of 26-28 separate files was a problem in previous editions so the use of Portfolios was used. It will be available in print form in a couple of months.

Puting one file up has so many problems with putting it up on the internet and browsing. I do not know of another way. Always open to suggestions. I have sent the whole file to those who have contacted me.

Thanks for bringing my attention to this. I was not aware of the problems. Remember the individual files within the portfolio could be separately saved.
Stephen

Thank you, Dr. Summerfield, for your kind reply.
I do not really know why ~25 separate files is really any problem. It is just ~25 simple hyperlinks of the form :

<a href="/the/path/tothe/articlesdirectory/file-name.pdf"
title="The Title of the Article" target="_blank">The Title
of the Article</a>

Upload all the .pdfs with the articles to the "articlesdirectory" folder on the server.
The "title" attribute in the links aids in search engine visibility, and provides a mouseover label to identify the link to a user. This is especially useful for visually impaired users, whose text-to-speech functions usually call out these mouseover labels.
The blank "target" attribute opens a new window when the link is clicked. Depending on the user's settings, they will either see the .pdf rendered in the new window or be prompted to approve downloading it to their machine.

You may know it, but the articles inside an Adobe Portfolio are not individually spidered and indexed by search engines. So it will provide much better visibility to have (i) individual .pdf files and (ii) the articles in text inside the .pdf. This is the default setting when making (printing) a .pdf. You can be sure that a .pdf includes text if you can highlight and copy/paste some of the text in the .pdf of the article. With individual files in text-based .pdf, the search engines will index the full contents of the articles.

Hi Seroga,
Just reading the above post gives ME a headache…Thank god for people like you who understand this stuff, so I can benefit from it in the end :)

Dear Seroga
I do not upload the files on Napoleon Series and it is to make his job easier. This is a preprint publication. The printed form is the form that is taken by many military museums and libraries.

The portfolio view gives the nearest sensation of flicking through a real paper journal. We have tried the individual file manner but there were so many problems with this with mistakes made on the URLs etc.. to administer. All other papers are HTML on the site and it was hard enough to move to a newer better form where the editor is in full control of the look. It is not perfect. Certainly something more to consider.
Stephen