Mini edition environment for LaTeX

When writing an article or book using the LaTeX document preparation system, Indologists sometimes want to have a śloka or two printed on the page with some text-critical notes.  A famous example of this kind of layout is Wilhelm Rao's 1977 edition of the Vākyapadīya that edits the whole text this way, in each verse having its own mini-critical-edition format.

Here is a simple way to get this kind of layout in LaTeX.  I create a new environment called "miniedition":

\newenvironment{miniedition}
    {\begin{quote}
    \addtolength{\textwidth}{-\rightmargin} % width of the quote env.
    \begin{minipage}{\textwidth}
    \itshape 
    \let\footnoterule\relax}
    {\end{minipage}
    \end{quote}}

This puts a minipage environment inside a quote environment, switches on italics and switches off the footnote rule.  It's pretty simple.  The clever bit is done by the minipage environment itself, that makes footnotes inside its own box, not at the bottom of the page.  The footnote numbers are lowercase alphabetical counters, to avoid confusion with footnotes outside the environment.
Here's how you would use it, and the result:

\begin{miniedition}
pāraṃparyād \emph{ṛte ’pi}\footnote{N: \emph{upataṃ}?} svayam 
\emph{anubhavanād}\footnote{My conjecture; both manuscripts are one syllable 
short. K: 
\emph{anubhavad}; N: \emph{anubhavād}.} granthajārthasya samyak\\
pūrṇābdīyaṃ phalaṃ sadgrahagaṇitavidāṃ \emph{aṃhrireṇoḥ}\footnote{N: 
\emph{aṅghri-}, 
with identical meaning.} \emph{prasādāt}\footnote{N: \emph{prasādaḥ}.}||
\end{miniedition}

Output (with added text before and after:

The miniedition text is indented left and right, and followed immediately by the critical notes.  The footnotes at the bottom of the page are a separate series.  In both the main body text and the miniedition, you just use \footnote{} for your notes; LaTeX does the right thing by itself according to context. 
The miniedition environment does not break across pages, it is meant for for short fragments of text, one or two ślokas. 
This example is taken from Gansten 2017.

Fwd: Work Flows and Wish Lists: Reflections on Juxta as an Editorial Tool

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk@gmail.com>
Date: 18 January 2014 21:58
Subject: Work Flows and Wish Lists: Reflections on Juxta as an Editorial Tool
To: Philipp André Maas <Philipp.A.Maas@gmail.com>, Alessandro Graheli <a.graheli@gmail.com>, Karin Preisendanz <karin.preisendanz@univie.ac.at>, Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk.cikitsa@blogspot.com>

Some interesting reflections on Juxta...

----
Work Flows and Wish Lists: Reflections on Juxta as an Editorial Tool
// Juxta

I have had the opportunity to use Juxta Commons for several editorial projects, and while taking a breath between a Juxta-intensive term project last semester and my Juxta-intensive MA thesis this semester, I would like to offer a few thoughts on Juxta as an editorial tool.

For my term project for Jerome McGann's American Historiography class last semester, I conducted a collation of Martin R. Delany's novel, Blake, or, The Huts of America, one of the earliest African American novels published in the United States.Little did I know that my exploration would conduct me into an adventure as much technological as textual, but when Professor McGann recommended I use Juxta for conducting the collation and displaying the results, that is exactly what happened. I input my texts into Juxta Commons, collated them, and produced HTML texts of the individual chapters, each with an apparatus of textual variants, using Juxta's Edition Starter. I linked these HTML files together into an easily navigable website to present the results to Professor McGann. I'll be posting on the intriguing results themselves next week, but in the meantime, they can also be viewed on the website I constructed, hosted by GitHub: Blake Project home.

Juxta helped me enormously in this project. First, it was incredibly useful in helping me clean up my texts. My collation involved an 1859 serialization of the novel, and another serialization in 1861-62. The first, I was able to digitize using OCR; the second, I had to transcribe myself. Anyone who has done OCR work knows that every minute of scanning leads to (in my case) an average of five or ten minutes of cleaning up OCR errors. I also had my own transcription errors to catch and correct. By checking Juxta's highlighted variants, I was able to—relatively quickly—fix the errors and produce reliable texts. Secondly, once collated, I had the results stored in Juxta Commons; I did not have to write down in a collation chart every variant to avoid losing that information, as I would if I were machine- or sight-collating. Juxta's heat-map display allows the editor to see variants in-line, as well, which saves an immense amount of time when it comes to analyzing results: you do not have to reference page and line numbers to see the context of the variants. Lastly, Juxta enabled me to organize a large amount of text in individual collation sets—one for each chapter. I was able to jump between chapters and view their variants easily.

As helpful as Juxta was, however, I caution all those new to digital collation that no tool can perfectly collate or create an apparatus from an imperfect text. In this respect, there is still no replacement for human discretion—which is, ultimately, a good thing. For instance, while the Juxta user can turn off punctuation variants in the display, if the user does want punctuation and the punctuation is not spaced exactly the same in both witnesses, the program highlights this anomalous spacing. Thus, when 59 reads

' Henry, wat…

and 61 reads

'Henry, wat…

Juxta will show that punctuation spacing as a variant, while the human editor knows it is the result of typesetting idiosyncrasies rather than a meaningful variant. Such variants can carry over into the Juxta Edition Builder, as well, resulting in meaningless apparatus entries. For these reasons, you must make your texts perfect to get a perfect Juxta heat map and especially before using Edition Starter; otherwise, you'll need to fix the spacing in Juxta and output another apparatus, or edit the text or HTML files to remove undesirable entries.

Spacing issues can also result in disjointed apparatus entries, as occurred in my apparatus for Chapter XI in the case of the contraction needn't. Notice how because of the spacing in needn t and need nt, Juxta recognized the two parts of the contraction as two separate variants (lines 130 and 131):

This one variant was broken into two apparatus entries because Juxta recognized it as two words. There is really no way of rectifying this problem except by checking and editing the text and HTML apparatuses after the fact.

I mean simply to caution scholars going into this sort of work so that they can better estimate the time required for digital collation. This being my first major digital collation project, I averaged about two hours per chapter (chapters ranging between 1000 and 4000 words each) to transcribe the 61-62 text and then collate both witnesses in Juxta. I then needed an extra one or two hours per chapter to correct OCR and transcription errors.

While it did take me time to clean up the digital texts so that Juxta could do its job most efficiently, in the end, Juxta certainly saved me time—time I would have spent keeping collation records, constructing an apparatus, and creating the HTML files (as I wanted to do a digital presentation). I would be remiss, however, if I did not recommend a few improvements and future directions.

As useful as Juxta is, it nevertheless has limitations. One difficulty I had while cleaning my texts was that I could not correct them while viewing the collation sets; I had, rather, to open the witnesses in separate windows.

The ability to edit the witnesses in the collation set directly would make correction of digitization errors much easier. This is not a serious impediment, though, and is easily dealt with in the manner I mentioned. The Juxta download does allow this in a limited capacity: the user can open a witness in the "Source" field below the collation visualization, then click "Edit" to enable editing in that screen. However, while the editing capability is turned on for the "Source," you cannot scroll in the visualization—and so navigate to the next error which may need to be corrected.

A more important limitation is the fact that the Edition Starter does not allow for the creation of eclectic texts, texts constructed with readings from multiple witnesses; rather, the user can only select one witness as the "base text," and all readings in the edition are from that base text.

Most scholarly editors, however, likely will need to adopt readings from different witnesses at some point in the preparation of their editions. Juxta's developers need to mastermind a way of selecting which reading to adopt per variant; selected readings would then be adopted in the text in Edition Starter. For the sake of visualizing, I did some screenshot melding in Paint of what this function might look like:

Currently, an editor wishing to use the Edition Starter to construct an edition would need to select either the copy-text or the text with the most adopted readings for the base text. The editor would then need to adopt readings from other witnesses by editing the the output DOCX or HTML files. I do not know the intricacies of the code which runs Juxta. I looked at it on GitHub, but, alas! my very elementary coding knowledge was completely inadequate to the task. I intend to delve more as my expertise improves, and in the meantime, I encourage all the truly code-savvy scholars out there to look at the code and consider this problem. In my opinion, this is the one hurdle which, once overcome, would make Juxta the optimal choice as an edition-preparation tool—not just a collation tool. Another feature which would be fantastic to include eventually would be a way of digitally categorizing variants: accidental versus substantive; printer errors, editor corrections, or author revisions; etc. Then, an option to adopt all substantives from text A, for instance, would—perhaps—leave nothing to be desired by the digitally inclined textual editor. I am excited about Juxta. I am amazed by what it can do and exhilarated by what it may yet be capable of, and taking its limitations with its vast benefits, I will continue to use it for all future editorial projects.

Stephanie Kingsley is a second-year English MA student specializing in 19th-century American literature, textual studies, and digital humanities. She is one of this year's Praxis Fellows [see Praxis blogs] and Rare Book School Fellows. For more information, visit http://stephanie-kingsley.github.io/, and remember to watch for Ms. Kingsley's post next week on the results of her collation of Delany's Blake.

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Shared via my feedly reader

Dominik Wujastyk, from Android phone.

Kenney on the poor success-rate of editorial conjectures

I cite this page of Kenney's The Classical Text often, partly in my own mind, and partly to friends and colleagues.  So I thought I'd reproduce it here.

The point being, be careful with conjectures, and remain sanguine that - if it is ever possible to check - over 95% of your conjectures will be wrong.

-----

• Dawe, Repertory.
• Boeckh
• Madvig, Adversaria.

Future philology

A very interesting and enjoyable Skype with Elenea Pierazzo at KCL left me with lots to think about, and links to all sorts of digital projects that I was unaware of or only half-aware of previously, including

• Interedition
• Gregor Middell's work on Juxta etc.
• Tanya Clement's work on Juxta etc.
• Digital Resource for Palaeography
• The various projects at the Huygens Institute in DH (here).
• The work of the European Society for Textual Scholarship (http://ests2012.huygens.knaw.nl/)
• Textualscholarship.nl
• http://www.e-laborate.nl/en/
• Edward Vanhoutte's work

Switching from Devanāgarī to Roman with a single command

I have to admit even I am startled by the success of this.
In the input file below, I changed the single command:

• \setdefaultlanguage{sanskrit}

to

• \setdefaultlanguage{english}

and the result was the following:

A minimal edition of a Sanskrit verse, using XeLaTeX and Ledmac

And here's the input for the above (tested and working in September 2019):

\documentclass{book}

% Set up things for XeLaTeX, and Devanagari.

% Simplified version of http://cikitsa.blogspot.com/2010/07/xelatex-for-sanskrit.html

\usepackage{polyglossia} % the multilingual support package

% Next, from the polyglossia manual:

\setdefaultlanguage{sanskrit} % this is mostly going to be Sanskrit,

\setotherlanguage{french} % with some French embedded in it,

\setotherlanguage{english} % and some English.

% These will call appropriate hyphenation.

\usepackage{xltxtra} % standard for nearly all XeLaTeX documents

\defaultfontfeatures{Mapping=tex-text} % ditto

\setmainfont{Gandhari Unicode} % could be any Unicode font

% Now define the Devanagari font:

% John Smith's Sahadeva, input using standard UTF8 transliteration

\newfontfamily\sanskritfont [Script=Devanagari,Mapping=RomDev]{Sahadeva}

% Now come the commands for the critical edition formatting:

\usepackage[noeledmac]{ledmac} %"noeledmac" stops some annoying messages

% customizations to Ledmac, and macros to make life easier.

\def\Variant#1{\Afootnote{\relax#1}}

\def\Lemma#1{\lemma{\relax#1}}

\let\Reference=\Bfootnote

\let\Grammatical=\Cfootnote

\let\Tibetan=\Dfootnote

% in a real edition, I'd probably also make

% abbreviations for \textfrench (perhaps \tf) etc.

\def\Omission#1{$\langle$#1$\rangle$}

\def\ScribalDeletion#1{{\rm[\kern-.15em[}#1{\rm]\kern-.15em]}}

\def\hardspace{\texttt{\char`\ }}

\def\And{{\rm\penalty-1\quad$\mid\mid$~}} % divider between variants to the same lemma

% more customizations: make the A notes

% (\Variants and \Lemmas)into two-column format,

% and make the B notes (\Reference) normal footnotes.

%

% changes to stuff cut-and-pasted from ledmac.sty:

\makeatletter

\renewcommand*{\twocolfootfmt}[3]{%

\normal@pars

% \hsize .45\hsize

\hsize .49\hsize

\parindent=0pt

\tolerance=5000

\raggedright

\leavevmode\hangindent1.5em\hangafter1

\strut{\notenumfont\printlines#1|}\enspace

{\select@lemmafont#1|#2}\rbracket\enskip

#3\strut\par\allowbreak}

\foottwocol{A}

\renewcommand*{\normalfootfmt}[3]{%

\normal@pars

\parindent=0pt \parfillskip=0pt plus 1fil

\hangindent1.5em\hangafter1

{\notenumfont\printlines#1|}\strut\enspace

{\select@lemmafont#1|#2}\rbracket\enskip#3\strut\par}

\footnormal{B}

\makeatother

\firstlinenum{1}

\linenumincrement{1}

% and here begins the edition:

%

\begin{document}

\chapter*{yogaśatakam}

\large

\section*{\textenglish{The example verse by itself}}

\textenglish{From \emph{Yogaśataka: Texte m\'edical attribu\'e

\`a Nāgārjuna\ldots par Jean Filliozat} (Pondich\'ery, 1979), pp.\,1, 59:\par}

\bigskip

kṛtsnasya tantrasya gṛhītadhāmna-\\

ścikitsitādviprasṛtasya dūram|

vidagthavaidyapratipūjitasya\\

kariṣyate yogaśatasya bandhaḥ|| 1||

\bigskip

\section*{\textenglish{The example verse, with apparatus}}

% we could use the \stanza command, but I haven't bothered.

%

% I find that the judicious use of indentation

% and newlines helps enormously to see what's what.

% Using a good "folding editor" would be even better.

%

\begingroup

\beginnumbering

\autopar

\edtext{

\edtext{kṛtsnasya}{

\Variant{%

\textfrench{N1 détruit, C1 }kṛtas tasya,

\textfrench{C2 }kṛtasya.}

\Tibetan{\textfrench{T \emph{mth'yas}, ``sans limite, immense''
traduit }kṛtsnasya.}}

tantrasya

\edtext{gṛhītadhāmna-}{

\Variant{\textfrench{Ca, JK }dhamnā.}}\\

\edtext{ścikitsitā}{

\Lemma{cikitsitād} % not ``ścikitsitā'', of course. We're preserving
the sandhyakṣaras.

\Variant{\textfrench{C1, C2 } cikitsitāt.}

\Tibetan{\textfrench{T \emph{gso-spyad} ''pratique de la
thérapeutique''. Ordinairement

  \emph{gso spyad} est ``investigation del la th.''}}}% comment sign to stop a break after the conjunct

\edtext{dviprasṛtasya}{

\Lemma{viprasṛtasya} % as above with cikitsitād.

\Variant{\textfrench{Ca} cikitsitārthaprasṛtasya, \textfrench{C1, C2}
viprasutasya.}}

\edtext{dūram}{

\Variant{\textfrench{Ca} dūrāt}}|

\\ \indent

%

% the above line is annoying. Because the whole verse is

% inside an \edtext{} macro, in order to get the

% \Grammatical note naming the upajāti verse, we have to

% avoid having paragraph breaks, which are not allowed

% inside \edtext{}.

% instead, we use \\ (newline) and \indent (paragraph indent)

% to get the same visual effect. A nasty kludge.

%

vidagdhavaidyapratipūjitasya\\

\edtext{kariṣyate}{

\Variant{\textfrench{N1} karikṣete.}}

yogaśatasya bandhaḥ|| 1||

}{\Lemma{}\Grammatical{Upajāti.}}

\par % necessary to stop \autopar complaining. Thanks to Alessandro Graheli.

\endgroup

\end{document}

Just discovered http://www.textualscholarship.org/
as well as the website of Birmingham's ITSEE: http://www.itsee.bham.ac.uk/index.htm

Dānasāgara fo Ballālasena on text criticism.

The Dānasāgara of Ballālasena (ca. 1200) includes a number of interesting and important remarks on the nature of Sanskrit scholarship, methods of teaching and learning, the creation of manuscripts and their donation to temples, etc. The displayed passage describes textual criticism (ed. B. Bhattacharya, 1953, Bibliotheca Indica 274, pp.४८०-८१).

More on early editions of the Mahābhāṣya

The 1876 Catalogue of Sanskrit and Pali Books in the British Museum, by Haas, p.100, contains the entries on the right for Mahābhāṣya editions:

Thus, there was the beginning of an edition by Ballantyne in 1855-1856, which is very early. Although this is only a small part of the whole text, the Navāhnika is a seminally important part of the work.  It is interesting to see that even in this very early edition, the commentary of Kaiyaṭa and the subcommentary of Nāgeśa are included. Ballantyne usually worked in close collaboration with paṇḍits, whom he was generous in acknowledging. I will be interesting to know with whom he produced this edition.

Then there's an edition fifteen years later, in Varanasi in 1870. This looks like a real "paṇḍit's" edition, also with the important commentary of Kaiyaṭa but with only notes from the editors and from Nāgeśa and by the paṇḍits themselves. Its production, just over a century after Nāgeśa Bhaṭṭa's death, and in his home town, is likely to embody at least to some extent a direct lineage of the interpretation of the text from the great Varanasi grammarians of earlier times, including Vaidyanātha Payaguṇḍa, Nāgeśa and Bhaṭṭoji Dikṣita.

And then the 1876 Haas catalogue gives the entry on the left, which refers to the lithograph discussed in my post of October 16, 2007, about the lithographer William Griggs and the shockingly expensive lithograph he produced. Haas has identified or corrected the date of the manuscript (saṃ 1751 = AD 1808/9). I have not seen the edition yet, but I would hazard that the manuscript is part of the old IOLR collection in the BL. This lithograph was published in London in 1874, in a limited edition of 50 copies. There's this copy in the British Library, and I would expect to find copies in Oxford and Cambridge at least.

So now we know that the impulse behind this old lithographic edition came from Theodore Goldstücker (1821-1872), who was at that time a professor at University College London, having been invited to move from Germany to England by H. H. Wilson in 1850. Goldstücker was a "Forty-Eighter" in the sense of being a refugee from the German Revolution of 1848-1849. This lithograph edition of the Mahābhāṣya was published posthumously.

It would seem, though, that even at the time of its publication, the London edition has already been partially superseded by the Varanasi edition of four years earlier. However, the London edition provided the whole of Nāgeśa's subcommentary, where the Varanasi edition only gave extracted notes, so it certainly pushed the boundary of knowledge forward.

Goldstücker had earlier written a book about Pāṇinian grammar that was important and impressively penetrating for its time. The title of the 1861 edition of the book in the BL online catalogue is Panini, his place in Sanscrit Literature ... A separate impression of the preface to the Fac-Simile of MS. No. 17 in the Library of Her Majesty’s Home Government for India, etc. (BL classmark 14092.cc.4.). The text had first appeared as a preface to his edition of the Mānava-kalpa-sūtra, and was only published as a separate book in 1861. It was reprinted in Allahabad in 1914, Benares 1965, and may still be reprinted occasionally in India.

The excellent entry on Goldstücker in the DNB written by Nick Allen (doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/10925) throws valuable light on the interaction between Goldstücker's personality and his scholarship. He had a private income, and never drew a full salary from any university. Goldstücker functioned on the pattern of an eighteenth-century enlightenment gentleman scholar, in Steve Shapin's sense (A Social History of Truth), free from the prejudicial taint of employment and thus able to pursue truth impartially. He was very clever, very talented, and very hard-working. But his ambitions for scholarly achievement were so high that he judged much of his own writing to be unready for actual publication. Although kind and friendly on a personal level, he engaged in severe, even savage, criticism of other published Western scholars, but published little of his own work. Several of his books, including the Mahābhāṣya edition, were in fact facsimile or typeset reproductions of Indian scholastic manuscripts. In his introduction to one such edition, of the Jaiminīyanyāyamālāvistara by Mādhava, Goldstücker lays out his intention to publish a European equivalent of the famous Bibliotheca Indica series, with a special mission of publishing the manuscripts of the Colebrooke collection in the British Museum and, if possible, manuscripts from the Sarasvati Mahal library in Thanjavur that would be brought from Thanjavur to London by His Serene Highness Prince Frederic of Schleswig-Holstein, who was a Sanskritist.

As Allen notes, "For so learned a scholar Goldstücker's output was disappointing, and exercised only limited influence." Several of his main research projects ballooned in size and detail out of all proportion, becoming entirely unwieldy and impossible to complete or to publish. Thus he left a trail of unfinished works behind him. Two volumes of his minor articles and lectures were published posthumously in London in 1879. His papers were deposited in the British Museum, with a stipulation that they would not be published until after 1920, but by that time the Great War and subsequent scholarly progress and shifts in perspective meant that his works would no longer be viewed as worth the labour of editing and publication. As Allen further noted, "Critics have also said that, for all his zeal and fastidiousness, he lacked sound judgement, and was insufficiently critical of native Indian scholarly tradition." Golstücker held enormous admiration for the tradition of Sanskrit scholarship in India, and believed that Indian culture and society would gain immeasurably through the recovery of its ancient intellectual achievements, and that this was most appropriately achieved through a synthesis of Indian and European scholarly effort. Yet his own efforts to achieve his goals and to advance Sanskrit scholarship were, finally, Quixotic: grandiose, severe, and ultimately vain when compared with his undoubted talents.

Critical edition typesetting

Some years ago, John Lavagnino and I wrote the EDMAC
software for typesetting critical editions. EDMAC was an application for use with plain TeX. Later, adaptations were made to allow EDMAC to work with LaTeX etc. More recently, the ConTeXt package, also based on TeX, has been developing methods for handling critical edition typesetting.

Idris Hamid, Colorado State University, recently gave this talk at the TUG 2007 conference, San Diego, about doing critical editions using ConTeXt.

Earliest edition of the Mahābhāṣya?

William Griggs (1832–1911) was the inventor of a photolithographic process. The DNB entry on him has the following extraordinary information:

Griggs was as successful in bringing down the price of reproducing old manuscripts and letterpress texts as he had been in reducing costs in chromolithography. His production of fifty copies of the Mahabhasya (the standard authority on Sanskrit grammar), consisting of 4674 pages (1871), was carried out for £6000 less than the estimate for a tracing of the original manuscript by hand, an enormous sum at the time. More widely known were his Shakespeare quartos, with critical introductions by Frederick James Furnivall and others, in forty-three volumes (1881–91); hand-traced facsimiles of the same works by E. W. Ashbee, superintended by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, had been sold at more than eight times the price.

I was unaware of this piece of printing history, and it would be interesting to find out who commissioned this particular work, and to see copies of the photolithograph. It seems implausible that it would have cost much more than £6000 to commission scribes to copy out the Mahābhāṣya in the late 19 century. Griggs worked in London, in close association with the India Office.

intratext.com

I've just discovered www.intratext.com. An interesting service. Already has some trs. of Sanskrit and Pali texts. Has the Skt text of the RV in ITRANS format. Thought-provoking. Should we all jump on board?