Granthinām

A critical edition is one which presents the editors hypothesis about some state of text and presents systematically the evidence on which that hypothesis is based in a critical apparatus. To justify the made up text at best the whole of the rejected textual variants have to be presented systematically in the critical apparatus which should build a aggregation of the whole transmission and represent the witnesses sufficiently. Although there are fine critical editions which were made completely with customary word processors like Word or Word Perfect for save yourself a lot of trouble it’s a good idea to plan such a project with software which was made especially for that purpose. They are more convenient for that and special typesetting features like multiple levels of footnotes are solely available here anyway. Here I would like to present the available solutions with a view to Linux.

Classical Text Editor on Wine

The price winning Classical Text Editor (CTE) which was developed by Stefan Hagel at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in context of the KVK project and is pretty mature (feature list here), the actual version is 8.2. The last time it was developed very close to the project Philosophy and medicine in Early Classical India at the ISTB for the edition of the Carakasaṃhitā. The CTE supports Unicode and OpenType fonts and has an indexing system. It’s Windows software, but I’ve tried and it seems to run pretty well on Wine (1.0.1 on Debian Squeeze, 32 Bit Version even on AMD64). It’s not free, the 30-day trial restricts the output. It produces PDF and also TEI/XML and HTML output formats are supported.

PlainTeX / ConTeXt

If you are doing (Plain)TeX (which has its advantages) and want to do critical editions surely Edmac (last version 3.17) is the packet you’ve found already. The Edmac macros which have been developed in the early nineties by John Lavagnino and Dominik Wujastyk – a real pioneer work. Several fine editions have been done with this packet including theVyāḍīyaparibhāṣāvṛtti and of the Skandapurāṇa in Groningen (see here) and several others in other disciplines. The packet has been described in Critical edition typesetting – the EDMAC format for plain TeX (San Francisco, Birmingham 1996) and briefly in Overview of EDMAC [TUGboat 11,4 (1990), 623-43]. There is also a “consumer report” written by H. Breger to be found, Erfahrungen bei der Anwendung von plain TeX und Edmac auf die Leibniz-Edition [Die TeXnische Komödie 4 (1996), 16-22]. The structure of TeX and of the macros makes the whole thing open for getting employed by other applications and furthermore for external datasets to be piped into it, for example the Critical Edition Typesetter (CET) by Bernt Karash (Windows software) features an Edmac export, and the Mac collation packet Collate (it seems that both programs are not developed anymore) could automatically generate Edmac tagged text as an output (cf. E. Johnson: Collate Interactive collation of large textual traditions). It’s right to separate the variant storage from the typesetter like it is the concept of software like Collate (and the successor Anastasia). Thinking about what could be a development of TeX critical editing software, cutting-edge applications should definitely be open for the import of data containers like XML (cf. P. Robinson: Towards a scholarly editing system for the next decades [2nd ISCLS presentation]). Seeking for what is actually happening on the non-LaTeX sector, there is a critical edition packet CriTeXt announced for ConTeXt (see here) which looks very promising even because ConTeXt per se is highly capable to deal with external datasets.

LaTeX

If you’ve mastered the way into LaTeX there are a few complete packets fulfilling different needs of critical editors waiting for you. Just to mention it first here there is Ledmac (documentation) which was developed by Peter R. Wilson and which is a portation of Edmac to LaTeX (later was maintained by Dirk-Jan Dekker and now by Vafa Khaligi, recently 0.7). A FAQ and a showcase could be found on Dekker’s page (here). There is a mailing list on Ledmac to be found here. Ledmac runs fine together with the Unicode/OpenType capable engine XeTeX (towards that on the blog of Michael Slouber here and here so far). There are also subpackets like Ledarab, Ledpar is for parallel typesetting within the critical environment (minimal running example here). The other comprehensive packet for critical editions at LaTeX is Ednotes (recently 1.3a) by Christian Tapp und Uwe Lück (CTAN). Colleagues of mine are working with Ednotes and say it also works pretty fine. A good introduction to Ednotes even in comparison with Ledmac is the article Ednotes – critical editions typesetting with LaTeX [originally: TUGboat 24 (2003), 224-36]. To choose TeX Live as your TeX distribution – not only on Linux where it is the standard everywhere – is I would say always a good idea, and Ledmac and Ednotes are included here so you don’t have to install nothing manually (separate packet texlive-humanities at Debian and Ubuntu, TeX Live 2007 is it at Lenny/Karmic, 2009 at Squeeze/Lucid). TeX Live 2009 includes also the Harvard/Kyoto (or if you like: Kyoto/Harvard) input mapping (CTAN, on Debian/Ubuntu in the packet texlive-xetex). Lately appeared also Itrans input mappings for Devanagari and Kannada (see here) which makes XeTeX even more relevant for Indology (captured!).

Poemscol (currently 2.53) by John Burt of Brandeis University is for typesetting especially poetry. It pretty mature and well documented (see here), Burt also wrote articles on the packet, Typesetting critical editions of poetry [TUGboat 22,4 (2001), 353-61] and Using poemscol for critical editions of poetry (PracTeX 03/2005, with example sources). Poemscol is also included in TeX Live (to be found also in texlive-humanities on Debian and Ubuntu).

A pretty versatile extension packet for LaTeX is David Kastrup’s Bigfoot which provides multiple footnote levels next to many other enhancements of the standard footnotes (paragraphed footnotes etc. etc., a forerunner of that is Manyfoot). Kastrup presented the paper The bigfoot bundle for critical editions at the EuroTeX 2005, and Benefits, care and feeding of the bigfoot package at the BachoTeX 2007. There are also two presentations towards Bigfoot at the BachoTeX 2008 available as videos, State of the ‘bigfoot’ package and Beauty and the beast – design and implementation notes for ‘bigfoot’. Bigfoot ist also included in TeX Live 2009 (texlive-latex-extra at Debian and Ubuntu).