In particular Moureau points out that the long-established format of classical editions – numbering the lines of the page, with variants by line number at the page foot – is completely impossible to reproduce with any widely-used software.\u00a0 Here’s a random page from a recent edition of the letters of Isidore of Pelusium, vol. 3:<\/p>\n
How on earth do we do that in Word?<\/p>\n Now there is an online course with textbook, M Burghart, Digital Editing of Medieval Texts: A Textbook<\/em>, online here<\/a>.\u00a0 Chapter 4 discusses how to encode the variants in something called TEI.\u00a0 This is a computer file format.\u00a0 It’s horrible.<\/p>\n TEI is no doubt possible to learn, but working with tagged text files is horrible.\u00a0 It imposes a huge initial cost on anyone wishing to adopt this approach.\u00a0 It’s very error-prone.<\/p>\n However this does introduce an interesting general issue.<\/p>\n Basically in order to do a critical edition, you must need to go through two stages.<\/p>\n Anyone familiar with modern methods of computer program design will immediately recognise a common computing pattern – pull the presentation layer out of the code, and do it as a separate layer.\u00a0 Don’t mix it in with the main logic.\u00a0 Let the logic get the data in whatever way is useful and reasonable; and then pass that to the front end to display in whatever way is useful.\u00a0 The two sections of the program can be developed separately. and if you need to change the output format, or the on-screen appearance, you don’t have to change every part of the program.<\/p>\n The Burghart paper does indicate that TEI (the database, essentially) can be used in this way, to generate different outputs.<\/p>\n But creating a file\/database encoded in TEI means doing things in text files.\u00a0 That’s very error-prone at the best of times.\u00a0\u00a0TEI is just a format.\u00a0 What is needed is some “casual casual easy thing,” some bit of software that stores what you put in in TEI, and redisplays it in an easy way.\u00a0 \u00a0I know people have attempted this, but the results that I have seen look awful.<\/p>\n Is there a tech billionaire in the house?<\/p>\n TEI is a very tech-heavy approach, that imposes a lot of pain upfront for no gain.\u00a0 It gets in the way.\u00a0 I can’t face doing it, and I’m a former programmer!\u00a0 In Word on the other hand I can just start, and get on with what I want to do.\u00a0 But I’m then stuck.\u00a0 There’s no easy way to transform the output into some other format, say from positive to negative or back again.<\/p>\n I’ve no idea what the answer is.\u00a0\u00a0In the meantime we’re stuck with Word.<\/p>\n For the New Testament, where there are thousands of witnesses, and stemmatics does not work, the apparatus is always presented negatively.\u00a0 Indeed in the Nestle-Aland edition, special symbols are introduced, known as “critical sigla”, indicating insertion and omission etc.\u00a0 These are supported by special Greek fonts, such as Gentium.\u00a0 I found an article online by Brent Nongbri here<\/a>, describing them:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/SC586_Isidore3_page-scaled.jpg\")
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