Re: [NTG-context] Critical Editions?

Dear list, I am currently working on a critical edition as well, and follow the discussion with interest. For the time being, I prefer Latex over Context for this project. In addition to Jürgen's remarks on transcription fonts, a small contribution: Arabists and turcologists working with transcriptions used to have similar problems. In the nineties I adapted existing postscript fonts with Fontographer. I also made sure to copy kerning information from extant letters (e.g. a) to new ones (e.g. ā) with the required diacritic (usually dots, dashes and haceks). This was in the pre-unicode era. Today there is the Brill font which is quite extended, yet I am not sure if it can be used freely in other publications. Adapations to extant fonts can still be made with the open source app FontForge. Do not hesitate to contact me offline if you need help on this. Regards, Robert info@mo-perspectief.nl

Op 9 jan. 2022, om 11:23 heeft hanneder--- via ntg-context het volgende geschreven:

I was just writing a mail (below) and saw:

...

They do indic scripts and Kai made the first version of the devanagari code for the context fontloader code that I then optimized.

Fascinating. Where can I learn more about that or is that user-unfriendly (my technical knowledge is rather limited).

Dear Hans,

two recurring problems are rather specifically Indological and they concern hyphenation and font.

1. In Sanskrit prose it is possible to produce compounds that span a few lines. The concept of "word" or "word division" fails here, as are the TeX mechanisms.

What we need in practice would be a "hyphenation" for the language Sanskrit that hyphenates after all Sanskrit vowels (in transcription this would be a, ā, i, ī, u, ū, ṛ, ḷ, e, o, ai, au. The last two cannot be split, "au" is one vowel with one vowel sign in the original script). Of course, we want to improve this automatic spelling occasionally, so we need to be able to insert a \- without thereby disabling the hyphenation for this compound.

I think in critical editions the problem of the disabled hyphenation also arises when a variant is added inside a word. In any case hyphenation is a real nuisance in critical editions.

2. Fonts that contain all necessary diacritics have become sparse. (This is more a lamentation, not much one can do about it, I guess).

When I started TeXing people were used to writing aṭavī as a\d{t}av{\=\i}. Not user friendly, but it worked with many fonts. With each new font regime Sanskritists had to search for new fonts, invent work-arounds etc. Even the most promising attempts (I spent a lot of time with OmegaTeX) eventually disappeared. Now we are dependent on whether an otf font has the underdot characters (ṭḍṃḥ) and the vowels (āīūṛ). Within the commercial fonts, I found only one "Brotschrift" that worked, which is Adobe Text Pro. I really like Minion, for instance, but the latest otf Version has no ṭ etc.

Thank god, we have many TeX fonts derived from older ones that still work, but many entries in the TeX Font Catalogue do not!

Jürgen

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Prof. Dr. Juergen Hanneder Philipps-Universitaet Marburg FG Indologie u. Tibetologie Deutschhausstr.12 35032 Marburg Germany Tel. 0049-6421-28-24930 hanneder@staff.uni-marburg.de

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