collatex-critical : A handy tool for critical editions

[Dhaval Patel]

Dear friends,

Many of us work in the field of digital humanities, philology, critical edition etc.

A tedious task in the field of manuscript editing is to create a critical edition with apparatus. 

Collatex is a text collation tool which is available for quite some time. It outputs text differences in ASCII table, XML, JSON, SVG, or HTML. 

Whereas for publication or sharing in scholarly communities and for easy reading, the preferred output formats are markdown, HTML, PDF or TEX. 

collatex-critical is a trial in that direction. It utliises the JSON output of collatex and prepares an edition with majority / priority reading as the main text and the rest of the readings as apparatus in the footnote / endnote.

It is also designed to transliterate the edition to as many transliteration schemes as one pleases. Usually Western scholars would like to read the work in IAST and Indian scholars would like to read the work in Devanagari. As the changes occur in only the plain text witnesses, generating multiple transliteration of the critical edition should not be a difficult task. Currently Devanagari, IAST and SLP1 are supported. It can be extended to as many transliteration schemes as indic-transliteration supports. The transformation from one file format to another is carried out by pandoc.

I understand that scholars would need to have a much fine grained control over the generated result, but for preparing a visual comparision of collated data, the tool will still be a good companion. The core idea is to have the full flow from the witnesses to the collated PDF automated and to support multiple transliteration schemes. 

A PDF generated from test data is attached for reference.

As usual, bug reports and feature requests are welcome.

Do give it a try with your data and raise issues at https://github.com/drdhaval2785/collatex_critical if required. 

I hope it will be of interest to the scholarly world. 

--

Dr. Dhaval Patel, I.A.S.

[Dhaval Patel]

I received feedback off the list from a colleague that the output would not be too appealing if each footnote sits in a separate line. It has been corrected. The new version writes footnotes continuously, so that the space utilization is maximized and presentation is more scholarly.

If any further feature request / bug reports are there, please feel free to open an issue at https://github.com/drdhaval2785/collatex_critical/issues .

With regards,

Dhaval