This message is for colleagues who use TeX, LaTeX and Biblatex.

I recently did some experiments in using the "biblatex-manuscripts-philology" (github) written by Maïeul Rouquette (geekographer and author of the French book "XeLaTeX Applied to the Humanities"). 

I find it to be interesting, powerful and pleasing in its clean design.  By "clean" I mean that it separates information about manuscripts (kept in a Biblatex database) from formatting and output. 

You build up a database of manuscript information using tailored biblatex fields like "support."  Then you use the features of Biblatex to control the output formatting. If you know Biblatex, you already know how powerful the combination of style and \printbibliography options can be. The manuscript output can be a conspectus siglorum, or a bibliography of manuscripts sorted by location city, or other choices and criteria.  The distribution at CTAN includes this demonstration file.

Earlier this week, I talked with Maïeul about adding some features for dealing with Indic manuscripts, and he was immediately responsive and helpful.  We've updated the package so that it recognizes supports such as "palm leaf" and "birch bark" as well as scripts like "Devanāgarī" "Śāradā," etc.  The changes are documented and already posted at CTAN as version 2.0.

If you work with manuscripts or critical editions (EDMAC, Ledmac, reledmac), biblatex-manuscripts-philology is worth a look.

Best,

Dominik