"Medical History" going from free, Open Access, Creative Commons licensed to copyright-controlled closed access

In a controversial move, the journal Medical History is moving from being an "Open Access, no Article Processing Fee" journal to being a closed, copyrighted, fee-charging journal.

1957: the launch

The first issue of Medical History, edited by W. J. Bishop, appeared in 1957 (front matter).  Medical History rapidly established itself as a journal of primary importance in the field of medical history, especially in the anglophone world.  In many ways the evolution of the journal's content from 1957 to the present day is a mirror of the evolution of the field of medical history itself, from the reminiscences of senior physicians to the work of professionalised medical and social historians.  From its earliest issues it included the writings of such figures as Charles Singer, Lynn Thorndike, and Walter Pagel, and over more than half a century Medical History has become a journal of record for its academic field.

At its launch, the journal was printed and published by Dawsons of Pall Mall.  An annual subscription to four issues cost $7.50, or $2.50 for society members.

1960: Wellcome Trust funding

In 1960, just a year before his death, Bishop published a letter to the readers announcing that the Wellcome Trust had made a five-year grant to enable the journal to continue publication.  This grant was an appropriate decision by the Trust, at that time still bound by the terms of Sir Henry Wellcome's Will that included a stipulation that the Trust should support the study of the history of medicine (see, e.g., the first and first and second reports of the Wellcome Trust).

1965: Wellcome Trust ownership

Five years later, when the Wellcome Trust's initial grant came to an end, Dawsons decided no longer to publish the journal, and "surrendered all their rights in the journal."  Its publication was transferred to the Wellcome Historical Medical Library (see here).  Since the WHML was owned and solely funded by the Wellcome Trust, this change effectively institutionalised the Trust's support for Medical History.  That support has enabled the journal to continue publication until last year.

2005-2011: The Open Access years

But the single biggest change in the journal's history came in 2005.  That year, the Wellcome Trust issued a public statement as follows:

Medical History – entire archive freely available online

The first complete archive of a medical history journal has been deposited into PubMed Central, as part of a £1.25 million programme led by the Wellcome Trust, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the US National Library of Medicine (NLM). 

In addition to the digitization of the back catalogue, all future issues of Medical History will be made freely available online at the time of publication.

This project supports the Wellcome Trust’s position of supporting open access to scientific literature, and complements the ongoing work to establish a UK PubMed Central. 

(Bold print mine.  See full announcement.)

The editors of Medical History also announced the move to Open Access in a statement in July 2005, and an agreement was signed between the Wellcome Trust and UCL in September 2005 that stipulated that all intellectual property for the journal was vested in UCL, that all management decisions would be taken by the editors at the UCL Wellcome Centre, and that the journal would be completely Open Access.

Following these changes, the entire archive of Medical History, from 1957 to the present, was digitized and put online at PubMedCentral (here), and publication in print and online was handled by the British Medical Journal Group.

Between 2005 and 2011, in accordance with the Wellcome Trust's Open Access policy, each issue of Medical History has appeared in print and online more or less simultaneously.  As the Trust says on its website,

It is a fundamental part of our charitable mission to ensure that the work we fund can be read and utilised by the widest possible audience. We therefore support unrestricted access to the published outputs of research through our open access policy.

Not only were the articles in Medical History published Open Access, but the journal charged no Article Processing Fee (APF).  For both authors and readers, Medical History was free. And authors retained their copyright under a Creative Commons license.  These are the most enlightened policies in the three key issues of modern academic publishing: free authorship, free readership, and authors' retention of copyright.  (A large contemporary literature discusses the new business models underlying these new structures of academic publishing.)

As everyone knows, these policies are critically important for authors on low incomes, including scholars from eastern Europe and many parts of Asia and Africa.  Only these policies guarantee that readers everywhere can benefit from research findings, and that researchers can contribute their own work for open publication and dissemination without encountering a financial barrier.  The Wellcome Trust and the journal's editors broke important new ground in this policy change, adopting the highest ethical and research standards.

2006: EAHMJ partnership

In 2006, Medical History partnered with the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health, becoming the official journal of that association, and accepting EAHMH members onto its board of editors (announcement).  In doing so, the journal returned to its roots in one sense, since it had started in 1957 as the organ of a consortium of medical history societies.  At the time of writing (spring 2012), the EAHMH website still presents Medical History as its society journal, stating that,

The EAHMH encourages publication in the journal Medical History. Medical History is a refereed journal devoted to all aspects of the history of medicine and health, with the goal of broadening and deepening the understanding of the field, in the widest sense, by historical studies of the highest quality. It is also the journal of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health. The membership of the Editorial Board, which includes senior members of the EAHMH, reflects the commitment to the finest international standards in refereeing of submitted papers and the reviewing of books.

Plans were made in 2009 to bring Medical History and the EAHMH closer together, creating a single subscription to both the journal and to the society.  However, before these plans could be finalized, the Wellcome Centre closed and the management of the journal moved briefly into limbo.

2010: The Wellcome Trust Centre shuts

The chief editors of Medical History were always senior research staff at the Wellcome Historical Medical Library.  That institution changed its name several times, finally becoming the "Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London" in 2000 (announcement by its then Director Roy Porter).

Ten years later, in 2010, in a controversial change of policy, the Wellcome Trust announced the closure of the Wellcome Centre (Wellcome Trust announcement, Times Higher Education reports here, and here, The Telegraph).  The majority of senior staff retired or dispersed to other centres worldwide, and Centre's programs in teaching and research were closed.  A small cross-departmental group remained at UCL, focussing on the history of neuroscience (here).  What would happen to Medical History?

2011: Interregnum

After the closing of the Wellcome Trust Centre, editorial control of the journal passed to UCL staff, including Roger Cooter and Vivian Nutton, who wrote an editorial statement in 2011 that was bullish about the future health of the journal, in spite of the closure of the Centre and the presumed loss of Wellcome Trust funding (Nutton and Cooter 2011 and  Cooter 2011).  Just one more issue of Medical History has appeared in the Open Access PubMedCentral archive since the last statement, the fourth and last for 2011.  At the time of writing (Feb 2012), references to Medical History on the UCL website lead to dead links.

2012: Cambridge University Press takes over

An announcement on 30 Jan 2012 by Cambridge University Press explains that the editorial control of Medical History has moved to the University of York, and that the journal has a new editor, Sanjoy Bhattacharya, a reviews editor, and an editorial board comprising no fewer than forty-six members, about thirty more editors than the journal has ever had before.  The journal is still supported by the Wellcome Trust, though details are not given.  According to an announcement by Bhattacharya, "the ownership of this journal has passed to Cambridge University Press." 

Cambridge University Press (CUP) is now operating the journal as a Closed Access journal.  If you wish to publish your article Open Access with a Creative Commons license, and retain your own copyright, you must pay $1350 or £850 (here).  CUP requires all non-paying authors to sign a contract transferring their copyright to CUP (contracts here).  The contract permits authors to post a pre-publication, pre-final-editing copy on their own or their university's website.  The terms also state that, "All articles will automatically be deposited in PubMedCentral upon publication" (statement).  But since PubMedCentral is an Open Access, full text website, it is hard to see why an author would pay $1350 if the full text of their article is to appear free in PubMedCentral in any case.  The answer seems to be in the terms of CUP's contract, that suggests that it only the pre-publication version of articles that will appear in PubMedCentral from now on, and not the final published version, as in the past.

At the time of writing (Feb 2012) the January issue of Medical History has not appeared in PubMedCentral.  It will be interesting to see the terms on which it does appear there.

CUP website

PubMedCentral

Cambridge University Press is keen to promote the journal by pointing to its illustrious past, and has a "Highlights of a Decade" page, showcasing selected articles.  But several of these articles, although originally published Open Access and copyrighted by their authors, are presented on CUP's website as being published by CUP, and have been assigned a DOI pointing to CUP's website, and a statement that the article was published online on 07 December 2011.  There is no reference to PubMedCentral, where the articles were actually published online, and much earlier, and where they are still freely downloadable.  CUP did not publish these articles.  The full text of the articles is not available on the CUP website, nor is there any suggestion that these "Highlights of a Decade" can be read freely at PubMedCentral.

Maybe CUP will solve these problems in the future, and come to a more graceful accommodation with the Medical History's Open Access past.

---

References and notes

Editors of Medical History:

• W. J. Bishop, (1957-1961), 5 years.
• F. N. L. Poynter (1962-1972),  11 years.
• Edwin Clarke (1973-1979),  7 years.
• William F. Bynum and Vivian Nutton (1980-1999),  21 years.
• William F. Bynum and Anne Hardy (2000-2002), 3 years.
• Harold J. Cook and Anne Hardy (2003- 2010), 8 years.
• Vivian Nutton and Roger Cooter (2011),
• Sanjoy Bhattacharya (2012- )

Resources

• John Symons, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine : a Short History (London: Wellcome Trust, 1993), is the best account of the Institute's history.
• Vivian Nutton, "Half a Century of Medical History" Medical History, 2007: 1-2, is a brief overview of the journal's history.

Declaration of interest

I have published in Medical History.

T500+ubuntu 11.10 = slow wifi network access

News, November 2012: 

The problem described below went away with the upgrade to Ubuntu 12.10 (Linux kernel 3.5).  Thank goodness, and high time.
 
--

There's a bug between the Thinkpad T500 and wireless n transmission.

Bug discussion here, fix here, thanks to Damon:

sudo rmmod iwlagn
sudo echo "options iwlagn 11n_disable=1" > /etc/modprobe.d/disable11n.conf
sudo modprobe iwlagn

Timpanaro

Last year some time (2011), I read the first chapter of Timpanaro's The Freudian Slip (another tr. available here).  At the end of the chapter, I let out a roar of spontaneous laughter, because of the sheer absurdity and over-learnedness of Timpanaro's writing.  Let me explain.

Timpanaro is examining the opening episode of Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life.  In that justly-famous work, Freud narrates a meeting in which a young jewish man fumes about anti-semitism in Austria, ending with a citation from Virgil (Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor (Aeneid, IV 625)) that he gets slightly wrong.  In a virtuoso display of cleverness and psychological interpretation, Freud shows that the error, or slip, was not as random as it seemed, and that all sorts of things about the young man's suppressed hopes and fears can be deduced by careful thought about these errors.  Freud's account is hugely entertaining, real Sherlock Holmes stuff.

What Timpanaro does, at  e n o r m o u s  length, and with staggering erudition, is to argue that the young man's error can be explained by the mechanism of banalization, just like some of the slips of scribes copying manuscripts.  Timpanaro's display of erudition is truly gob-smacking.  (And I use this crude characterisation as a deliberate counterpoint.)

But what is Timpanaro saying, finally?

Timpanaro is saying what Freud himself is thought to have said so very much better: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Timpanaro's display of intellectual fireworks is not just hors de nécessité
in my view.  It is otiose.  The cigar comment makes exactly the same point.  It makes it concisely, clearly, and with humour to boot.

Furthermore, the whole point of Freud's Psychopathology and the Virgil misquotation story is that things one might think are banal may, through analysis, be shown not to be banal at all.  For Timpanaro to say "yes, yes, it's banal" is to miss the most essential point of what Freud is saying.  Whether or not this particular episode was banal or not, Timpanaro is being obtuse in asserting that it was.

Burning the Library of Alexandria, again

The website formerly known as http://library.nu used to provide free downloads of PDFs of published academic books, often in violation of copyright. A few days ago, a consortium of publishers aggressively closed down the site and is seeking to bankrupt the people who ran it, and possibly send them to jail.

At the request of 17 publishing companies in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, including HarperCollins, Oxford University Press and Macmillan, a Munich judge on Monday granted injunctions against illegal posting or sharing of online book files by two websites. Library.nu is alleged to have posted links to hundreds of thousands of illegal PDF copies of books since December 2010, Ed McCoyd, an attorney for the Association of American Publishers, told The Huffington Post. The majority of these uploads allegedly went through the website iFile.it, he said.
The coordinated legal action came after seven months of private investigation and was led by a German publishing association, Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, and the International Publishers Association.

The Munich court served Library.nu and iFile.it 17 separate injunctions, representing 10 book titles from each of the publishers. One of the injunctions, which The Huffington Post viewed in a translation from the original German, states that every Web link -- either on iFile.it or Library.nu -- leading to an illegal online copy of one of the named books would result in a fine of 250,000 euros or as much as six months in jail.-- from the Huffington Post, which gives more detail. See also The Verge, Indie Bookspot, etc.

The maxium fine would thus be 17 publishers x 10 books x $250,000 = $42,500,000. 

Instead of going after the library.nu guys, the publishers' coalition should have hired them, and monetized the site as a subscription service for e-books, like iTunes for music.  Shortsighted publishers, locked into yesterday's world-view, a discipline-and-punish approach, and an eagerness for excessive profit.  Predictably enough, the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels is amongst the strongest supporters of the pernicious and controversial ACTA legislation that has been widely opposed in street demonstrations across Europe this year (WikiPedia).

It is particularly hypocritical that in their press release, the publishers' conglomerate cites as the first reason for their action, "the interest of the authors who depend on fair compensation for their work."  Academic authors are routinely exploited by commercial publishers, who drive down royalties to single-figure percentages (normally only paid after the publishers have first recouped their own investment), and impose binding contracts on authors that deny them even the basic right to make a single photocopy of their own work, or to pass on their copyright to their legal heirs after death.  Many academic publishers pay no royalties at all.  If academic publishers wanted to offer authors "fair compensation for their work," they should look to their own practices first.

What has annoyed the publishers most, according to their own statement, is that library.nu earned an estimated ten million dollars in advertising revenue.  The period over which this money was made is not mentioned, and one has to query the method by which this estimate was made.  Nevertheless, if it is even partly true, it provides a stinging indictment of the publishers themselves, that they have not had the imagination or creativity to create a business model that could generate this kind of revenue and share it with their authors.

For example, a service like library.nu could be operated as an educational charity, with subscription revenue being shared between authors and charitable educational purposes like research and writing fellowships.  The platform could be used to advertise hard-copy copies of the PDFs, at prices competing with technologies such as the Expresso Book Machine (1 cent per page).  It is a long-established research finding that the distribution of electronic texts frequently boosts the sales of hard copy editions, especially if the advertising is done right (e.g., here, here, and Michael Hart's 1997 report "Electronic Monographs are Great Advertising").

As one commentator has noted, the library.nu archive, estimated at about 400,000 books, still exists.  You can't put the genie back in the bottle.  The whereabouts of the archive is not easily discovered (I don't know it), but it may be in Russia somewhere.  Suing it's creators will not solve the problem in the longer run.

We need to learn two lessons from this:

1. Anyone systematically archiving in-copyright publications needs to watch out!
2. In the modern, networked world, the true price of a publication is the value to a person of a clean conscience. 
   In principle, all books, films and music are and will be available for free download, for anyone willing to break the law of copyright.  But many people do not wish to live like that, and would willingly pay a reasonable price in order to have a clean conscience.  THAT is the future market value of an electronic cultural asset, not a figure calculated on the basis of production costs, shareholder returns, or authors' royalties.  

So, what is the price of a clean conscience?  It's hard to say, but on a per-book basis, I would say it is quite low.  It seems to me that Netflix has it about right: $7.99 per month in the USA, £5.99 per month in the UK, for unlimited online streamed film watching.  Lovefilm.com in the UK is offering unlimited streamed films at £4.99 per month.  

There are two interesting things about Netflix and Lovefilm's business model.  First, the low prices.  Second, the subscription model.  The subscription gives the company a steady, predictable income from month to month, which is a major gain.  A more-or-less captive group of customers, most of whom will not frequently change their subscriptions.

It has been rumoured for quite a while that Amazon is thinking about a subscription service for downloadable books, and with their Kindle service they certainly have the infrastructure for this.  The kno.com service for academic course books does something along these lines: e-textbooks for about 50% of the hard-copy prices, but with content enrichment (online features for note-taking, etc.).  It's not subscription - nobody is there yet - but it's close.

See also:

• http://e-library-free.blogspot.com/
• http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/2012227143813304790.html

Scribal abbreviation 2

Here's another instance of the same abbreviation from the same scribe, proving HI's conjecture about it being a ring.

Scribal abbreviation in Sanskrit manuscript

Here is an extract from folio 4r of MS Baroda 12489 (includes the Carakasaṃhitā), showing इति iti followed by a ह ha with a loop to the right of the glyph.  A bit like the loop on the syllable ॐ oṃ. This is probably an abbreviation for the phrase इति स्माह भगवानात्रेयः iti smāha bhagavān ātreyaḥ that occurs as the second phrase in most chapters.

Here is the phrase from the next chapter, f.5v of MS Baroda 12489.


Baroda 12489 dates from AD 1816/17.
 
Scribal abbreviations are not as common in Sanskrit manuscripts as they are in medieval European ones.

colophons, names of text portions in Sanskrit manuscripts

I believe that David Pingree introduced the term "post-colophon" into Indian manuscript studies when he wrote his catalogue of the Bodleian Chandra Shum Shere jyotiṣa collection.

Am I right that nobody outside Indological circles (and those influenced by indologists in the last few decades) uses the term "post-colophon"?

Here's a grid of usages:

Key: Pingree (various catalogues, starting 1984)
Tripathi: C. Tripathi, Cat. of Jaina MSS at Strasbourg
Wikipedia: see here and links.
X: no special term


Description      Pingree       Tripathi         Wikipedia (and non-indologists)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Final verse
of text                       X                     X              explicit

iti...samāptam        colophon      colophon       X (or colophon?)

saṃvat phrase       post-            Scribal           colophon
                               colophon       Remarks

after saṃvat
phrase                    X                  post-             X
                                                     colophon

 

Pratapaditya Pal uses "post-colophon" in his 1978 Arts of Nepal book
(http://tinyurl.com/37n8f2z), in the same sense as Pingree.  Perhaps
that's where David got it?

Copyright and Open Access

[Links updated 2018]

Never sign away the copyright of your own writings.  Instead, grant the publisher a license that gives them what they want, and assigns to you the rights that you want.  Here are such licenses, in several languages:

• https://web.archive.org/web/20170704083507/http://copyrighttoolbox.surf.nl/copyrighttoolbox/authors/licence/

For background on the Zwolle principles, see here:

• http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/crews/01crews.html
• http://copyright.surf.nl/copyright/zwolle_principles.php (fetched from the waybackmachine)

and see also the SURF initiative, on Copyright Management for Scholarship:

• http://copyright.surf.nl/copyright/ (fetched from the waybackmachine)

[Added 2018:]

• Author Rights & the SPARC Author Addendum

ibus bug fix

Typing Sanskrit in Ubuntu Linux is normally very convenient, using the built-in ibus and m17n systems.  You can write देवनागरी or romanisation (devanāgarī) with just a switch of the keyboard input method. (Thansiang's input method for romanisation input is effective and convenient, but has to be added manually because it isn't included in the main m17n distribution.)

However, with the update to Ubuntu 11.10 in October 2011, a bug was introduced that spoiled typing for several Asian languages, for users of the standard Ubuntu Unity and Gnome windows managers.  The symptom was that as you typed a space, the letters around the cursor jumped into the wrong order. 

The November solution by fujiwarat fixed things.  But it hasn't yet made its way into the standard Ubuntu updates.  At the time of writing, you have to update your ibus installation to version 1.4.0 manually. One way to do it is here, kindly provided by Alex Lee.

March 2012 Update (gnome-shell)

Brandon Schaefer has fixed this ibus/unity bug (thanks!), but the fix will only be released in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Panglin.  Schaefer asks Oneiric users to wait a couple of months, since,

The changes would be to large and would require changes 

in both unityand nux. 

This is good for the future, but isn't great news for anyone who needs to type in an Asian language during the next two months.

And since ibus and the patch have moved along since the posting above, on 14 Jan, Alex Lee's instructions don't work any more.

The deb files that I made for myself in January, following Alex Lee's instructions are available here for a few months:

•  ibus1.4.0 for Oneiric 

Fetch the six files, put them in a directory, and run the following two commands in a terminal, in the directory containing the deb files:

• sudo apt-get remove ibus 
• sudo dpkg -i *.deb
• sudo apt-get install m17n

Log out and in for good measure, though it may not always be necessary.

Hope it works for you.  No guarantees, and no further help available from me, I'm afraid.   There has been a post suggesting that this does not work under unity (see here).  More testing required.  But it works fine for me under gnome-shell, and probably the other non-unity interfaces.

April 2012 update

All the above problems are solved in the 12.04 Precise Pangolin release of Ubuntu.  Just go with the defaults.

Furthermore, Pangolin's release now includes the input of Sanskrit roman transliteration as standard, using the IAST standard.  It's very nice.

Oneiric Ocelot upgrade woes

My main desktop machine got in a terrible mess during the Oneiric update.  Could have been my fault - I started the update and then left the machine for two days.  When I got back to it, it was frozen, and on hard reboot it wouldn't boot.  Finally, I got it back by booting from a USB stick and then using chroot to get a pseudo-login as root on the hard disk.

• http://karuppuswamy.com/wordpress/2010/06/02/how-to-chroot-to-ubuntu-using-live-cd-to-fix-grub-rescue-prompt/

Having a network connection, that enabled me to clean up the system with dpkg and apt-get, so I fetched all the latest versions of everything and updated and upgraded tidily.  But still couldn't get a boot because of an obscure network problem with connecting to the bus.  Finally solved by these (weirdly written) instructions:

• http://journalxtra.com/2011/10/upgrade-oneiric-ocelot/

Now up and running, amazingly.


--

and another thing...

The compiz grid feature developed a fault about putting a window on the top-right of the screen.  Solution is here: https://launchpad.net/~lbrulet-8/+archive/ppa

Ubuntu Evince menu fonts turn to garbage

Grr, recurrence of the old, old problem that the Evince menus turn to little squares like this:

Solution:

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=8216711&postcount=4, 
  that says:

sudo mv /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.evince ~/
sudo /etc/init.d/apparmor restart

Simplest Sanskrit XeLaTeX file

Input:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setmainfont[Script=Devanagari]{Nakula}

\begin{document}
Your Devanāgarī looks like this:  आसीद्राजा नलो नाम and your romanized stuff looks like this: āsīd rājā nalo nāma.  
\end{document}

Output:

You can get the Nakula font (and its twin, Sahadeva) from John Smith's website, http://bombay.indology.info

Guṭkās

Sanskrit booklets, or guṭkās, contain several works collected between one set of covers.  They were presumably copied sequentially by their owners as a vade mecum of useful knowledge.

Biswas 0891 (available digitized, no. 090393 at http://www.jainlibrary.org/menus_cate.php) is a series of catalogues of MSS in Jaina libraries in Rajasthan.  Volume 2 (1954), 73 ff. has a section that describes 222 such booklets, and lists their contents in detail.  A study of these particular collocations of texts would provide a valuable insight into reading habits, the circulation of texts and knowledge, and the personal tastes and obsessions of pre-modern Indian readers.

printer driver

Ubuntu, HP LJ 1300 - use the Gutenprint or the Foomatic/pxlmono driver.  Not CUPS or HPLIP.

Greedy grepping

to make a regular expression not greedy, append ?

Gleick

I'm reading Gleick's The Information.  Very enjoyable and interesting romp through loosely-connected stories in the history of science from Babbage to Shannon and beyond.  I've very much enjoyed all of Gleick's books.

Viruses and bacteria

Why computer "virus"?  The metaphor would surely work better with the image of a computer "bacterium," wouldn't it?  A bacterium can be eradicated, unlike most viruses.  Bacteria can be contagious, and can multiply cells and colonize a particular location.

Yes, "Computer bacterium" from now on, I think.

Natty tweaks

Essential tweaks for 11.04, from Webupd8

Ubuntu / dropbox

 If you get the warning

Unable to monitor filesystem
Please run "echo 100000 | sudo tee /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches" and restart Dropbox to correct the problem.

here's one way to increase the default value of /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches at startup, so one doesn't have to do it manually at every boot.

As root (or with sudo), create a file

/etc/sysctl.d/30-inotify.conf

with the contents

fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100001

Reboot, or run "sudo service procps start".


That's it!

devanagari.sty / xelatex clash

devanagari.sty uses the LaTeX2e font conventions (of course).  Today I had an old document using devanagari.sty that I'm just converting to XeLaTeX and UTF8.  It was fine, except that the document's English parts were in the chosen polyglossia font, while the table of contents was in cmr.

That was because of a statement

\def\DNrmdefault{cmr}

used by \NormalFont in devanagari.sty

The answer was to define \englishfont

\newfontfamily\englishfont{IndUni-P}

and then redefine \NormalFont as follows:

\DeclareRobustCommand\NormalFont{\dn@penitshape\englishfont}

In the end, this is all transitional nonsense, of course, since I will get rid of devanagari.sty and use XeLaTeX's internal facilities for the Devanagari in a day or two.

Hyphenating Sanskrit in roman transliteration

%!TeX program = xelatex
%
% Thanks to Yves Codet for the first version of this test file, and to Yves
% and Jonathan Kew for the hyphenation tables
% for Sanskrit (hyph-sa.tex):

%

% This file exemplifies the case where some Sanskrit is embedded in a
% mainly-English document, but the Sanskrit words are appropriately
% hyphenated. The Sanskrit words are in the argument of the
% \textsanskrit{} command.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{polyglossia}

\setdefaultlanguage{english}
\setmainfont{Charis SIL}

\setotherlanguage{sanskrit}
\newfontfamily\sanskritfont{Charis SIL}

\textwidth=0.5cm
\parindent 0pt

\begin{document}

Sanskrit hyphenation:
\par\smallskip

\textsanskrit{manum ekāgram āsīnam abhigamya maharṣayaḥ |\par}

\bigskip

English hyphenation:
\par\smallskip

manum ekāgram āsīnam abhigamya maharṣayaḥ |

\end{document}

DLI - DownLoad Impossible?

An exceptionally useful series of remarks about the Digital Library of India from PW, here: http://www.indologica.de/drupal/?q=node/1240

Thanks, Peter!

XeLaTeX, Velthuis encoding, and palatal nasals

When using the Velthuis input coding for Devanāgarī, and wanting to have it handled by XeLaTeX, one finds the palatal ñ disappears in the Nāgarī.

input: sa~njaya

output: स न्जय


That's because the Velthuis input code for ञ् is ~n, and the "~" is a special code in TeX, meaning "hard space".

Here's the workaround. I define a font-switching command \dev that will turn Velthuis into Devanāgarī. \dev is mostly made up of "\textsanskrit" which is set up using the standard XeLaTeX/polyglossia \newfontfamily commands. \textsanskrit does the work of invoking the mapping-conversion (from XeTeX's velthuis-sanskrit.tec file).

But just before \textsanskrit, we change tilde into a normal character. And after \textsanskrit, we turn tilde back into an "active" hard space. We use the \aftergroup command so that the "active" version of tilde is activated after the closing of the group that contains the Devanāgarī.

Here's the code:

\newfontfamily\textsanskrit [Script=Devanagari,Mapping=velthuis-sanskrit]{Nakula}

% Make the tilde into a normal letter of the alphabet

\def\maketildeletter{\catcode`\~=11 }

% Return tilde to being the default TeX "active" character for hard space

\def\maketildeactive{\catcode`\~=13 }

\def\dev{\maketildeletter\textsanskrit \aftergroup\maketildeactive}

Here's how you use it:

input: {\dev sa~njaya uvaaca}. What did Dr~Sañjaya say?

output: सञ्जय उवाच. What did Dr Sañjaya say?

where that space betwen "Dr" and "Sañjaya" is hard, and you can't break a line there.

Enjoy.

 

Update 2020:

Using David Carlisle's much better idea from the comments below, here's the new code:

 

\newfontfamily\textsanskrit [Script=Devanagari,Mapping=velthuis-sanskrit]{Nakula}

\def\dev{\edef~{\string~}\textsanskrit }
 

\begin{document}

{\dev sa~njaya uvaaca}. What did Dr~Sañjaya say?

\end{document}

 

 

Dr T. Bhaskaran

I am sorry to read today that Dr T. Bhaskaran has died (d. 12.8.2010).

In the 1980s, Dr Bhaskaran was Director of the Oriental Manuscript Library and Research Institute, University of Kerala. (On the OMLRI, that many of us will have visited over the years, see here). Amongst his many books, Dr Bhaskaran was particularly proud of his publication, with his successor Dr K. Vijayan, of the facsimile edition of a beautiful illustrated palm-leaf manuscript of the Rāmāyaṇa, over which he took great pains to ensure high-quality colour reproduction and typesetting (Chitra Ramayanam, 1997, published by the University of Kerala, Trivandrum Sanskrit Series no.265, and on CD by CDIT).


Dr Bhaskaran also prepared and published three volumes of the Alphabetical Index of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Oriental Research Institute and Manuscripts Library, Univ. of Trivandrum, that are essential guides to the MS holdings of the library.  This series was started with vol.1 (a - na, 6079 works) in 1957 by Suranad Kunjan Pillai, and continued with vol.2 (ta - ma, 7980 works) in 1965 by K. Raghavan Pillai. There the series halted for decades, until Dr Bhaskaran re-enlivened it, finishing off the alphabet (vols 3 & 4, 1984 & 1986, 5253 & 2218 works), and starting a supplemental series (vol. 5, 1988, covering 4643 works). Few people in the world can say that they have catalogued 12,000 Sanskrit manuscripts.  The impulse of Dr Bhaskaran's diligent cataloguing work directly inspired the library to complete the Supplementary Index in two further volumes (1995, 2000).  These seven volumes cover the 35,060 Sanskrit MSS in the library that have been catalogued, amounting to about half the library's total holdings.


Dr Bhaskaran was a member of the Ezhava community.  He was proud to have been such a leading figure in Sanskrit studies in Kerala, and explained to me a few years ago, when I visited him in his retirement in Aleppey, that the Ezhavas as a group were often quite wrongly categorized merely as toddy-tappers, when in fact many members of their society were physicians and herbalists, as well as Sanskritists.  As an example, he cited the famous facsimile inscription of 20 April 1675 in the Hortus Malabaricus (Amsterdam, 1678-1693) in which the Ezhava Itty Acyutan, "Doctor Malabaricus," wrote about his own contribution to that magisterial work of Dutch botanical science.


Dr Bhaskaran was a kind and learned man, who did much quiet and important work for the indological field of studies.

Wellcome Library: The Test of Time

Wellcome Library: The Test of Time: "Last year we brought you news of The Test of Time, a BBC Radio 4 series in which present day scientists reflected on the work of their ancie..."

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:

How do I install RomDev mapping for XeLaTeX (Unicode transliteration -> Devanāgarī)?

[Update, February 2011: Somdev has moved his blog to http://pratibham.blogspot.com/.]

Somdev Vasudev's RomDev mapping is installed as follows:

1. The actual mapping file is published by Somdev in his blog, here:
   http://sarasvatam.blogspot.com/2010/03/updated-teckit-romdev.html 
   [Update Feb 2011: now at http://pratibham.blogspot.com/2010/03/updated-teckit-romdev.html; update March 2012: now at https://github.com/somadeva/RomDev]
2. Cut and paste this text, and save it in a Unicode file called RomDev.map.  Save that file in a place which XeTeX can "see," e.g., something like local/texmf/fonts/misc/xetex/fontmapping/
3. You now need to compile the human-readable *.map file into a binary *.tec file, so that XeTeX can read it directly.  This is done by the program Teckit, which you can get here:
   http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=TECkitDownloads
4. I'm working with Ubuntu GNU/Linux.  For me, the command is,
   
   
   teckit_compile RomDev.map -o RomDev.tec
   
   

   I'm afraid I don't know the Windows or Mac command invocation.
5. 
   
   Now you have a file in a place like
   

   local/texmf/fonts/misc/xetex/fontmapping/RomDev.tec
6. 
   
   Run the command that rebuilds the database of files that TeX knows about.  In Linux it's
   

   sudo mktexlsr
7. That's it!  XeTeX and XeLaTeX can now see, and make use of the RomDev mapping, that converts Unicode transliteration into Devanāgarī, as exemplified in my earlier blog posts below. 

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}

XeLaTeX for Sanskrit

This example worked well in July 2010, but some TeX packages have since been updated slightly.  See the new, updated version of this example, posted on 27 May 2013.

Early Indian MS evidence for "zero"

Early Indian document with ref. to zero

The Bakhsālī manuscript was unearthed by a peasant in 1881 in the village of Bakhshālī about eighty kilometers north-east of Peshawar. The scribe wrote it in the Śāradā script on birch-bark using a pen with a flat, rectangular tip. The most recent research shows that this is the earliest Śāradā manuscript ever discovered, and suggests that it may be datable to as early as AD 700, although a date of 1200 has been proposed in the past. The mathematical work recorded in the manuscript is probably from the seventh century, and appears to have been composed in the Gandhāra
district. The manuscript describes the foundations of arithmetic, including approximations of square roots, rules of inversion and proportion, the rule of three, various forms of equations, and a series of example problems on fiscal, taxation, travel, and geometrical topics (Hayashi 1995). It also uses a dot to symbolize zero, possibly making it the earliest written occurrence of this sign in India.

---
T Hayashi, The Bakhshali manuscript : An ancient Indian mathematical treatise (Groningen, 1995).

TeXWorks for linux

TeXworks is a nice editor with an emphasis on multilingual use, simplicity and rapid document preview. It is from Jonathan Kew, author of XeTeX.

Binary downloads for Mac and Windows are available from the TeXworks home page. For Ubuntu Linux, there's a PPA here.

The Origins of Zero

In 1998, I wrote the following letter to the editor of the New Scientist magazine, in response to an article that appeared on 25 April 1998 by Ian Stewart, entitled Zero, Zilch and Zip.

---------- cut -------------

From ucgadkw@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk Sun May 3 15:28:53 1998
Date: Sun, 3 May 1998 15:28:52 +0100 (BST)
From: Dominik Wujastyk
To: letters@newscientist.com
Subject: Ian Stewart: Zero, Zilch and Zip

Dear Sir,

Ian Stewart writes engagingly about the origin of the mathematical zero and place-value notation ("Zero, zilch and zip", 25 April, p 41), but he suggests that these two concepts are connected, when they are in fact both logically and historically separate. You can count reasonably successfully with place-value notation but no explicit zero, and vice versa.

Ian Stewart is also quite wrong in saying that "place notation was born probably in India, maybe with Arab help, not too long after AD 200".

Three key elements -- a decimal base, place-value, and zero (I abbreviate this to "DPZ") -- occurred separately at earlier times both in India and in other parts of the ancient world. In particular, the Babylonians were using a place-value system, with a space for the null value, in the second millennium BC, but their base for counting was sixty, not ten. By the time of Alexander the Great, they were even using a special symbol for this null value. From perhaps as early as the third century AD the Mayans also used place-value and zero, but with the base twenty. But it does indeed seem to have been the Indians who first combined these key elements together to form the basis of the arithmetic system that has come down to the modern world.

The Arabs did not have anything to do with the invention, and indeed Arabs only arrived in India about five hundred years later than Stewart suggests. The Arabs (or rather, the Muslims of the Middle East) certainly did transmit knowledge about zero and the place-value notation to Europe, but they learned it all from the Indians. We call our numerals "Arabic", it is true, but Arabic writers called them "Hindu", meaning "Indian".

The Indian numerals are first mentioned outside India in the year 662, when the Syrian bishop Severus Sebokt, annoyed by the intellectual arrogance of immigrant Greek scholars, reminded them pointedly that other nations were also very learned, such as the Hindus with their admirable systems of astronomy and arithmetic, including calculating with nine symbols.

Indian works on arithmetic, translated from the original Sanskrit in to Arabic (perhaps through Persian or Syriac), began to reach the Islamic world in about the eighth century. The first book known to us from outside India that demonstrates Indian methods of calculating with nine digits and zero was composed in the ninth century, probably in Baghdad, by al-Khwarizmi (whose name, through the medieval Latin and Old French, gives us "algorism" and "algorithm"). From about AD 950 on, many Arabic works demonstrating these new Indian methods of working out arithmetical problems, including fractions, were circulated under the name "al-Hisab al-Hindi', or "Indian calculation". After 1100, Latin translations of Al-Khwarizmi's work spread throughout the centres of medieval learning in Europe, which is how the the Indian DZP system ultimately reached us today.

The earlier history of this number system in India is not perfectly clear, but the Indian astronomer Aryabhata, born in 473, was the first to describe the decimal place-value system explicitly, in a chapter of a work in which he also discusses algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. Before him, the third-century author Sphujidhvaja seems to be the first author to describe the use a symbol for zero in the decimal place-value system.

It is often claimed that the adoption of the DPZ system was a great epistemological change heralding the opening of vast new mathematical horizons, and a leap forward in knowledge generally. I do not see why a notational change of this type should be seen as so important, and there
is little actual historical evidence of such an effect. The counting system that has become second nature to us may seem consummate, but surely that is only a matter of what we are used to, what we have been taught from childhood. The Babylonians, using a non-DZP system, constructed vast tables of astronomical and arithmetical parameters which required extraordinary amounts of calculation, but we see no evidence that they were hampered by having a sexagesimal (60-based) and not a decimal system. Early Greek arithmetic was decimal, but was conducted without recourse to the use of zero. Sometimes a non-DZP notation can be positively helpful: to add ten and ten in Roman (X + X = XX) does not even require knowledge of another symbol, nor any notational manipulation beyond writing the symbols more closely together. What could be easier? That quintessence of modernity, the digital computer, abandons the internal use of decimals entirely, using only binary digits, or bits. The feeling that the DZP combination is in some way "better" than any other system is surely no
different in principle from any other chauvinistic belief, such as that that one's own mother language -- whatever it may be -- is the easiest, best, and most expressive language in the world.

In areas where sexagesimal (60-based) counting still lurks in our own mathematics, such as in the 360 degrees in a circle, we suffer no epistemological harm. That a right angle has ninety degrees has not held our civilization back in any obvious way, though measurement in radians is of course routine in higher maths.

If some future government, politically desperate for a "British Sausage" issue, decides to go for total, all-out decimalization and legislates that a circle shall have ten degrees, there may be a leap in learning, but it may in a direction of five degrees.

Yours faithfully,

Dominik Wujastyk

--
Dr Dominik Wujastyk, FAX/voice: +44 171 611 8545/8467
Wellcome Institute for URL: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgadkw/
the History of Medicine, Email: d.wujastyk@ucl.ac.uk
Wellcome Trust, 183 Euston Road, Trust URL: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk
London NW1 2BE, England.

First Rule of History:
History doesn't repeat itself -- historians merely repeat each other.

JabRef

Good! The new beta of JabRef, 2.6b3, now has a properly-working interface to JSTOR. One can search by keyword for JSTOR entries, and JabRef lists the hits and lets you import whatever you want to your bibtex database. JabRef even helpfully marks possible duplicates. Very nice indeed, especially for us humanists.

Get your JabRef here: http://jabref.sourceforge.net/

At the moment, JabRef and Mendeley seem to be moving forward fast. They approach the problem of bibliography management slightly differently, and offer different feature-sets. However, both are emerging as seriously useful tools.

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

Ztree under Ubuntu with Wine

The Gnome launcher for Ztree command line is
wineconsole --backend=user /path/to/Ztree/ZTW.EXE

Up The Junction

Under Windows, Dropbox wants everything it backs up to live in its own directory on your hard drive. Not soft/sym-links, but actual files.

However, if you're running Windows and have an NTFS drive, then you can in fact make "hard" soft links to your Dropbox directory without having to actually copy everything physically into the that directory. The tool is Junction, which handles hard links under NTFS. NTFS supports this natively, but MS in their wisdom never distributed a public tool to handle this feature.

Vienna University AKH on a bright Autumn morning

The Institute for South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies is straight ahead, through an archway and to the right.

... and now iBus

The latest release of Ubuntu, 9.10 Karmic Koala, has just come out and has replaced SCIM altogether with another system called iBus. However, everything seems to work almost identically from the user's point of view, and the tricks I mentioned earlier still make everything work. m17n also works with iBus.

LaTeX, Unicode, Kile, TeXmaker, Ubuntu Gnome, and SCIM /SKIM

I run Ubuntu GNU/Linux, with the Gnome windows manager. Kile is the most sophisticated LaTeX editor under Linux at present, and TeXmaker is also very good and has the added advantage of being cross-platform.

TeXmaker installs easily with aptitude, but Kile asks for the whole TeXlive distribution to be downloaded as dependencies. This is fine, as far as it goes. But the TeXlive distributed through aptitude is terribly out of date (2007). So it's quite reasonable to get a more recent TeXlive from TUG and install that. But then Kile still wants to install the old 2007 one through aptitude, and everything gets mess. Luckily, it's possible to fool aptitude into thinking that it's TeXlive is already installed. So now you've got Kile and and up-to-date TeXlive. Great, you think.

Until you start trying to type Unicode (you are using XeLaTeX, aren't you?).

Under GNU/Linux, you can use SCIM and the m17n input method, especially the excellent sa-translit and sa-devnag keyboard handlers to enter Unicode roman transliteration or Devanagari very quickly and easily, rapidly swapping keyboards with ctrl-space. It's great.

But Kile and TeXmaker are written using the QT toolkit, like many applications that are written for the KDE environment rather than Gnome. This means that SCIM doesn't immediately work with them. Blast.

Okay, it's deeply buried on the net, but there is an answer to this too, and it works. It's here.

Hooray! Kile, TeXmaker, TeX Live 2008, Ubuntu 9.04, Gnome, SCIM, m17n, all working fine.

I have to say, though, this should all be much easier, and should be done through aptitude.

Footnote:
After installing or uninstalling other language-related stuff in Ubuntu, sometimes iBus stops working. This can be fixed by going to System/Administration/Language Support and making sure keyboard input method is set to "ibus". Sometimes this tool also installs parts of the language support that are missing.

Also, if your writing area still give the ibus message "no input window", it can be aanecessary to right-click your mouse, select "input methods" and set "ibus".

Radio 4 broadcast

Episode 1 of "The Test of Time", on Suśruta's surgery:click here.

Academia.edu

I'm exploring the use of the new Academia website. My area is here.

Ballantyne's 1855 edition of the Mahābhāṣya

I'm glad to have found Ballantyne's edition of the Mahābhāṣya with Kaiyaṭa and Nāgeśa's commentaries, in the Digital Library of India collection. The edition is from Mirzapore, 1855 (bibliographical details).

Here are some representative pages from it:

Title page:

Mahābhāṣyam

bhāṣyapradīpena vivaraṇena ca sahitaṃ

kāśyāṃ rājakīyapāṭhālaye śrīmadvālaṇṭainnāmaka-

tadadhyakṣaprestais tatratyaiḥ

***

śrīnārāyaṇaśāstridevadatta-

durgodattaśarmabhirvyākaraṇapaṇḍitaiḥ

śrīmaccaturvedahīrānandaśarmabhir

alaṅkārapaṇḍitaiś ca saṃśodhitaṃ

sāṃkhyaśāstrādhyāpakaśrīmatkāśīnāthaśāstribhir

nidhyātaṃ

***

mirjāpurapattane trivedidurbaliśarmaṇā saṃśodhya mudrākṣariar upanibaddhaṃ

bhāratavarṣīya-

paścimottarapradeśādhyakṣaniyogān mudritam

// san 1855 īsvī //

So now we know that Ballantyne was aided by Nārāyaṇaśāstrī [and?] Devadattadurgodattaśarmā, specialist(s) in vyākaraṇa, and with Caturveda Hīrānandaśarmā, an alaṅkāra paṇḍit. These pandits

edited the text. The sāṃkhya professor Kāśīnāthaśāstrī reflected upon the

text (nidhyātaṃ), which presumably means that he edited the text for content.

The text was edited and typeset in Mirjāpurapattana by Durbaliśarmā.

And here are the first two and the last pages of the text: