eledmac A presumptuous attempt to port EDMAC, TABMAC and ...

6 1 IntroductionSince 2011’s Maïeul Rouquette begun to maintain and extend eledmac. Asplain TEX is used by little people, and L A TEX by more people eledmac and originalEDMAC are more and more distant.1.1 OverviewThe eledmac package, together with LaTeX, provides several important facilitiesfor formatting critical editions of texts in a traditional manner. Major featuresinclude:• automatic stepped line numbering, by page or by section;• sub-lineation within the main series of line numbers;• variant readings automatically keyed to line numbers;• caters for both prose and verse;• multiple series of the footnotes and endnotes;• block or columnar formatting of the footnotes;• simple tabular material may be line numbered;• indexing keyed to page and line numbers.eledmac allows the scholar engaged in preparing a critical edition to focusattention wholly on the task of creating the critical text and evaluating the variantreadings, text-critical notes and testimonia. L A TEX and eledmac will take care ofthe formatting and visual correlation of all the disparate types of information.The original EDMAC can be used as a ‘stand alone’ processor or as part ofa process. One example is its use as the formatting engine or ‘back end’ forthe output of an automatic manuscript collation program. COLLATE, written byPeter Robinson, runs on the Apple Macintosh, can collate simultaneously up to ahundred manuscripts of any length, and provides facilities for the scholar to tailorthe collation interactively. For further details of this and other related work, visitthe EDMAC home page at http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgadkw/edmac/index.html.Apart from eledmac there are some other LaTeX packages for critical editiontypesetting. As Peter Wilson is not an author, or even a prospective one, of anycritical edition work he could not provide any opinions on what authors in thisarea might feel comfortable with or how well any of the packages meet their needs.EDNOTES [Lüc03], by Uwe Lück and Christian Tapp, is another LaTeX packagebeing developed for critical editions. Unlike eledmac which is based onEDMAC, EDNOTES takes a different (internal) approach and provides a differentset of features. For example it provides additional facilities for overlappinglemmas and for handling tables. For more information there is a web site athttp://ednotes.sty.de.vu or email to ednotes.sty@web.de.The poemscol package [Bur01] by John Burt is designed for typesetting criticaleditions of collections of poems. I do not know how, or whether, poemscol andeledmac will work together.