[ekdosis] upcoming version of ekdosis, including code folding

[Robert Alessi]

Dear colleagues and friends of ekdosis,

General News
------------
ekdosis-dev is on the way to v1.5 but already can be installed by
anyone who wishes to take advantage of the latest features it
provides.[1]  Some of these are rather exciting ones, as for example:

- New functions for fragmentary witnesses and encoding lacunae.
- New commands for typesetting on paired pages.
- A new option to set 'maxentries' globally, that is to limit the
  number of entries per page that _all layers of critical notes taken
  together_ may accept.

The full documentation of the development version is available as a
PDF file.[2]

Code Folding with emacs
-----------------------
Users of the emacs editor might be interested in the new \App
command.  It is strictly equivalent to \app, except that it takes two
mandatory arguments instead of one, which allows for much more
flexible code folding.  This function is described on page 14 of the
documentation file.[3]  Its first argument is meant to receive \lem,
while \rdg, \note and the like go in the second argument, like so:---

```latex
I saw my friend \App{\lem{Peter}}{
  \rdg{John}
} at the station yesterday.
```

With the new 'ekdosis.el' AUCTeX style file, once code folding is
applied, this should be displayed as follows:

```latex
I saw my friend Peter at the station yesterday.
```

with the name 'Peter' fontified in a specific color.  As a result,
variants and notes are now hidden to let only the base text, fully
legible, appear in a clean source text with no more clutter!

Of course, using this alternate command leaves the TEI xml output
unchanged.

Upcoming Features
-----------------
These are described on the development page of ekdosis.[4] The most
exciting one will be the ability to instruct ekdosis to “freeze”
ranges of pages.  This will allow for example to compile only about
ten pages at a time while leaving the rest unchanged.  Compiling large
edition texts will then be much easier and faster.

Part of this new feature is already included in the development
version.  You will notice for example that if pages are added before
the edition text, ekdosis does not touch it anymore, even if the page
numbers have changed.

Happy TeXing!

-- Robert

Footnotes:
[1]  See http://www.ekdosis.org/install.html#orgbfbe2e5

[2]  http://www.ekdosis.org/images/ekdosis.pdf

[3]  http://www.ekdosis.org/images/ekdosis.pdf#page.14

[4]  http://www.ekdosis.org/development.html