[ekdosis] ekdosis v1.2

[Robert Alessi]

Dear members of the ekdosis list,

As I am about to announce v1.2 of ekdosis, I realize that I never made
any announcement about v1.1.  It must be said that in the last few
months I somewhat have lost track of my emails.  I will however try to
catch up in the coming weeks.  In the meantime, please accept my
apologies for this.

ekdosis v1.1
------------
So v1.1 was published at the beginning of last November, with the
following new features:---
- Improved documentation with new sections, notably "Variae
  Quaestiones"" and "Laying Out Parallel Texts".
- Compliance to LaTeX 2020-10-01 (namely: inclusion of xparse
  and new hook management).
- Improved \DeclareScholar meant to build a list of persons within the
  <listPerson> TEI element.  A new command \DeclareSource for editions
  used as sources was added.  As a consequence, 'source' and 'resp'
  were added as optional arguments of \lem and \rdg.
- Editorial changes: new commands \supplied, \surplus, \sic and \gap
  were added among others.
- Some commands were renamed: \SetxmlBibResource →
  \AddxmlBibResource and \TeXtoTEIPatt → \TeXtoTEIPat.
- A new command \addentries was added for modifying the number of
  accepted entries on the current page.
- ekdosis was modified to accept any page numbering scheme. (v1.0 only
  worked on pages numbered with Arabic numerals.)
- A new command \rdgGrp for sub-variation was added.

ekdosis v1.2
------------
This release has just been published and should be available from the
mirrors in a couple of days.  The announcement text follows:---
- Improved support of babel/polyglossia: it is now possible to apply
  to any layer of the apparatus criticus a language different from the
  one that is selected in the edition text. This is notably important
  eg. for Arabic or Sanskrit where it is customary to use a
  transliteration scheme in the apparatus criticus.
- New general hooks have been added, allowing for an initial
  separating rule, the styling of lemma texts and/or variant readings,
  &c.
- Poetry: ekdosis can now load and use the facilities provided by the
  verse package. Verse lines can be numbered independently of prose
  text. Of course, continuous line numbering remains
  possible. Indentation patterns are also supported. Furthermore, a
  specific environment for the encoding of line groups has been
  added. A detailed example from Raymond MacDonald Alden's edition of
  Shakespeare's Sonnets from the Quarto of 1609 with variorum readings
  is provided in the documentation, where an effort has been made to
  keep the typography and the punctuation of the original edition.
- Conditional page breaks: the line number and optionally the page
  number where a page break should occur can be specified. If the
  conditions specified be not met, then the page break is not
  triggered.
- Much improved export to TEI xml.

I am also very happy to announce that ekdosis is being intensively
tested in large projects involving Sanskrit, Syriac or Arabic edition
texts.  I should be able to post some news about Syriac and Arabic in
the coming weeks.

As for Sanskrit, of great interest is that an Anglo-German Haṭha-Yoga
project is now editing with ekdosis.
(https://www.uni-marburg.de/de/fb10/iksl/faecher/indologie/aktuelles/news/yoga-projekt)
This work has also led to the development of "babel-iast", a mapping
system for Romanized Sanskrit in IAST scheme to Unicode Devanāgarī.
(https://github.com/radardenker/babel-iast)  At the time of writing,
within the framework of this project, development towards producing
html output from TEI xml is underway.  Do not hesitate to ask for more
information should you be interested in knowing more about this.

What is good is that inter-disciplinary work always provides
opportunities to spot tricky issues, such as what I would call "the
Sandhi problem" for Sanskrit edition texts, namely rules that dictate
to write together in Devanāgarī words according to their final and
initial sound.  All of this has to be rendered properly in the edition
text, in the apparatus criticus in case some variant gets in the way
and of course in TEI and html output.  I hope to find a solution to
work around such issues soon.

Best wishes,

Robert

-- 
Robert Alessi
CNRS UMR 8167 «Orient & Méditerranée» (Paris)
<robert.alessi at cnrs.fr>