[NTG-context] Critical Editions?

[hanneder at staff.uni-marburg.de]

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




---

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