Hans Hagen wrote:

> At 05:34 PM 11/22/99 -0400, Steve Grathwohl wrote:
> >Berend de Boer wrote:
>
> >"EDMAC is a program written as a set of plain TeX macros for formatting
> >complex critical editions.  You mark up your text and notes using the tags
> >provided by EDMAC, and then TeX will create a beautiful book for you with
> >the text line numbered, lemmata referred to by line-number, up to six
> >layers of notes at the bottom of the page (variants, testimonia, etc.), as
> >well as up to six sets of notes sent to appendices.  It is also possible to
> >control the layout of each layer of notes separately: single column, two-
> >or three-column, paragraphed, etc."
>
> I wonder how they do the paragraph insert, since tex does not support them -)
>
> Anyhow, it sounds like a combination of blocks and buffers (already present) and multiple footnotes. Implementing classes of footnotes is no real problem, but in order not to break existing code, it is not a one hour hack either.
>
> Posing a limit on the number of classes seems unlogical, so we want as many levels as possible, each tunable in ways similar to the current one, of course working in columns, definable, start stoppable, optional being an end note, etc. I'll put it on my list of todo's.
>
> Hans
>
>

Some notes of the one who asked the question. Personally, I don't like the way critical editions typeset textcritical comments, in two series of footnotes. Readability of these apparatus is low, and therefore I recomended my friend to use footnotes for the bibliographical
comments (the larger ones) and marginnotes for the textual differences. This may not be usual, but readability is certainly higher. Moreover, marginnotes are built in in standard ConTeXt as well as LaTeX.
Ok, the reason for asking my question was that I, erroneously, thought I saw somewhere in the documentation of ConTeXt that it could do the job. With that idea in my mind, I said to my friend that Edmac (indeed, that's what I was pointing at) can do the job, but that the
interface of it is very unfriendly and that I thought that ConTeXt could do it, and that I would sort that out. Commands in EDmac are very complicated to type, such as horrible HTML-like commands as <B>This is a text <\B> Compare such commands to \title{This is a text}
and you see the difference.
Concluding: I've e-mailed the website of EDmac to my friend, along with the site of Piet van Oostrum, to let him read the LaTeX-handleiding, to give him an impression of what normal TeX typesetting is (sorry Hans, but at that time, my opinion was that LaTeX is standard in
Miktex whereas ConTeXt is not. Installing TeX is difficult for dummies, and he really is one. I've now seen fpTeX, but I still think that Miktex is the most convenient distri for win32. I like Yap. Much better than windvi.) He has just finished making his dissertation
camera-ready in Word (379 pages!) and he himself is not quite content about it (quite appropriately, as I heard from others). So I hope to convince him of typesetting his Latin critical editions in LaTeX (or ConTeXt), in particular because TeX is the only platform that
supports hyphenation of the Latin language.
Therefor, I don't think Hans has to do a second round of programming on behalf of me, especially not because in the end, I think critical apparatus in two series of footnotes is not the most beautiful way to do these things. I think there are a lot of things to do on
ConTeXt that are more important, such as documentation etc.
Thanks for all remarks and the answer, even now, when it is: no.
Greetings,

Maarten Wisse

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