the making of critical editions

Thu Apr 25 11:48:38 UTC 1991

I thought fellow INDOLOGISTs might be interested in the appended
announcement of a program for making editions, since this must still
rank as one of the centrally important tasks of our field.

A subsidiary reason for sending this note is sheer lack of modesty.  I
have been collaborating for some time with John Lavagnino (Brandeis) in
writing a program in the TeX macro language for formatting critical
editions.  As you will see below, the COLLATE program uses our program
EDMAC for printing its output.  But EDMAC is quite independent of
COLLATE, and can be used separately.  (In particular, EDMAC is not bound
to the Macintosh, but runs on any machine that runs TeX, and in practice
that means any machine on the market, with any printer or typesetter.)

If you have a critical edition on your agenda I suggest you have a look
at the capabilities of EDMAC (and COLLATE, perhaps).  EDMAC provides
unique facilities for creating up to five layers of footnote material
(variants, testimonia, etc.), with each layer's format separately
controllable (page-width, two columns, three columns, block paragraph
of run-on notes, etc.), up to five sets of end-notes;  automatic line
numbering; note references to line numbers (not superscript footnote
numbers), and much else.  For a full description of EDMAC's
capabilities, with examples (including a page of Sanskrit in
Devanagari) see:

John Lavagnino and Dominik Wujastyk, "An Overview of EDMAC: a plain
TeX format for critical editions" in TUGboat 11(4), 1990, pp.623--643.

The journal _TUGboat: Communications of the TeX Users Group_ is in most
University (Computing dept.) libraries.  For more information, email
the TeX Users Group at TUG at math.ams.com

A book documenting EDMAC in full, together with a disk holding the program
itself will shortly be published by TUG.

Dominik

------- Forwarded Message

Date: Wed, 17 Apr 91 22:22:30 EDT
From: Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear <EDITORS at edu.brown.brownvm>
Subject: 4.1248 Collate -- SW for MSS Collation (1/88)
To: Multiple recipients of list HUMANIST <HUMANIST at BROWNVM>

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 1248. Wednesday, 17 Apr 1991.

Date:     Wed, 17 Apr 91  11:06 GMT
From: PETERR at VAX.OXFORD.AC.UK (Peter Robinson)
Subject: Collate 1.0

Version 1.0 of Collate -- a new program for the collation of large
textual traditions -- is now available.

About Collate
-----------------
Collate aims to help scholars in the preparation of a critical edition
based on many sources. It can collate simultaneously up to a hundred
texts at once. It  can deal with richly marked-up texts (with special
treatment for editorial comments embedded in the text, location
markers, editorial expansions and separate collation of punctuation). It
provides powerful facilities to allow the scholar to tailor the collation
and it can output in many different formats.

Collate works interactively with the collation being written to a window
as the scholar watches.  The scholar may intervene at any point to alter
the collation, using either of the tools RSet VariantS or RRegulariseS.
RSet VariantS allows the scholar to over-rule the collation offered by
Collate and impose his own collation, even writing a variant that does
not appear in the sources into the collation.  RRegulariseS enables the
scholar to intervene to regularise any word or phrase in any source at
any point.  The regularisation can be set for a particular word at every
point in every source, or for that word only at that place in that
source, or various other combinations.  Collate will record all variants
set and every regularisation made and remember them next time it runs.
The scholar can adjust the collation in other ways, switching the base
text, suppressing agreements with the base text and collating
punctuation tokens separately.

The collation may be output in various critical apparatus forms
(including several  formats recommended by the Text Encoding
Initiative), or scholars may dictate their own format. Through an
interface to the EDMAC macros, developed by John Lavagnino of
Brandeis University and Dominik Wujastyk of the Wellcome Institute
for the production of complex critical editions with the typesetting
language TeX, editions with up to five levels of apparatus can be created
direct from the output of Collate. The EDMAC macros and an
implementation of TeX (OzTeX) are provided with the program.
Automatic generation of hypertext electronic editions from the output is
also possible.

Texts Collate can Process
- -----------------------------
The length of texts Collate can process is limited only by the storage
capacity of the computer. The only requirement is that the text be
divided into blocks containing no more than 32768 words each. Collate
works on both prose and verse and has been tested successfully on texts
in many languages (including Malay, Sanskrit, Latin, Middle English
and Old Norse).

A set of Guidelines for Transcription, provided with the program,
explains the format transcription files should have so that they can be
processed by Collate.  The transcription files must be plain ASCII files
and can be prepared on any computer.  A simple word-processor,
Transcribe, is also provided with Collate: this includes various
functions specially designed to help transcription.

The History of Collate
- --------------------------
Collate has been developed as part of the Computers and Manuscripts
Project, funded for three years from 1st September 1989 by the
Leverhulme Trust at the Oxford University Computing Service with
support from Apple Computer. Collate has been written by the Research
Officer for the Project, Peter Robinson (PETERR at AC.UK.OX.VAX).
The Project Director is Susan Hockey.

Program Availability and Requirements
- ----------------------------------------------
Collate 1.0 runs only on Macintosh computers (Classic or higher) and
requires one megabyte of memory to operate. A hard disc is
recommended. It can be ordered from:
The Computers and Manuscripts Project
Oxford University Computing Service
13 Banbury Road
Oxford OX2 6NN
England.
(Phone: 0865 273200; fax 0865 273275; email
PETERR at AC.UK.OX.VAX).

The program costs #20 pounds UK, 40 dollars US. Cheques should be made
payable to the Oxford University Computing Service; cheques in pounds
must be drawn on a British bank.

Documentation, sample files, Transcribe (version 1.1) and the OzTeX
implementation of TeX for the Macintosh, together with the EDMAC
macros, are provided with the program.

------- End of Forwarded Message