Thomas, Even if I am an occasional user of CTX (mainly class courses for beginners and sophomore or by trying to write samples of what it is possible to achieve with it), and if I think I am aware about what can do CTX or what it cannot do, I didn't know that you wrote a  wiki page on TEI-XML with ConTeXt : even if I am interested by clever printing and issues with multi-languages texts topics, I ignored your precious piece of work. I was interested by the questions of Pr. Jürgen Hanneder, because even if I don't know a word of Sanskrit,  it is allways a true pain to begin with technical requisits when your real job is to think about the problematic meaning of ancients or less ancients texts. You precise clearly what I think about University mores, and J. Hanneder tell us his problems, which all of us know. There are, for people who are working on Ancient Greek, Latin, Middle Age texts or Sanskrit (or whatever) some commercial tools which seem do the work : but technical efficiency asks allways money. I know of a company that works for a publisher, whose service is to code some Perl with text formatted in LaTeX and XML, in order to produce a display on screen and a printout on paper, until the page which presents the cover of the book and the summary of the contents, as well as its ISBN code, its price and the quantity of books in stock. ConTeXt was at the very start a kind of a clever answer to the huge of technical abilities asked by LaTeX, and free of charge, numerous people interested by text editing have turned their eyes to ConTeXt. I agree with you about reading and solving problems for a 400 pages text with 2 or 3 different languages and several levels of criticus apparatus : one needs to begin with the beginning or a kind of beginning with some issues given by a real and modest sample. Best//JP Le 04/01/2022 à 21:02, Thomas A. Schmitz via ntg-context a écrit : > I basically agree with everything you say, Jean-Pierre. Publishers are modern-day robber barons, and they have been stifling and exploiting scholars and scholarship for many years now. Behemoths such as Brill, de Gruyter, or Elsevier are bankrupting libraries in the entire world. However, we scholars also have some responsibility: if we could agree with each other, we could easily bypass the big publishers and have our critical editions (in a variety of formats) on our university’s websites. But we don’t do that: younger scholars need the validation of big name publications to build reputation and find a job, older scholars (myself included) are vain and/or old-fashioned and prefer a “real” book. > > For your questions at the end: as you know, TEI is an insanely huge beast. Nobody will be willing and/or able to implement all of it in ConTeXt. What we need is actual use cases: scholars coming here and building up the expertise via the work they’re actually doing. Preferably in smaller installments so the developers and advanced users can slowly prepare bits and pieces of these stylesheets. No-one is going to look at a 400-page edition with all kinds of special needs in one go; we start with a chapter, a few pages, and we make our way. That’s what I expected when I wrote the wiki page on TEI xml: that it would slowly develop into something more comprehensive. Alas, it has been sitting there for 11 years… Every now and then, someone will appear on the mailing list and say: I need four apparatuses and six parallel translations and bells and whistles at every paragraph, but when you ask for real examples and specifications, they ride out into the sunset, never to be heard of again… So: I’m all for continuing in this direction, but we need some continuity. (And, not to brag, but still: I even managed to obtain some funding a couple of years ago to improve the bibliographical support in ConTeXt; if you have a real project, you can always allocate some funding for these things). As for learning TEI: I really think this is absolutely inevitable; even if new formats will be invented in the future (and TEI has serious shortcomings for many sorts of manuscript traditions), they will probably do so with TEI as a starting point. > > I’m not working on a critical edition right now, but I have done some preparatory work and am willing to chip in! > > All best > > Thomas > >> On 4. Jan 2022, at 18:54, Jean-Pierre Delange via ntg-context wrote: >> >> Thomas, >> >> You are deeply right ! But this is an issue in academic edition, not only because students read no more at length (specially in humanities), and by consequence, don't buy books, but among other reasons there is a general problem in publishing in academic fields, pointed by Jürgen Hanneder : even Universities libraries don't buy all items published by scholars in a specific field, but publishers themselves have leveled the academic criterium by commercial/economic considerations. Then, scholars have to gather financial funding with technical computing practice, which is another issue, and furthermore they have to find money in order to publish at expansive cost (see Brill prices, for example). >> >> You are right about some academic tools, like those developed by Tuft University (like ancient greek thesaurus :http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/ or The Liddell-Scott-Jones online dictionary :http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/#eid=1), but for providing such tools as online digital work, there is two ways : >> >> 1. Academic courses on TEI XML given to advanced students in order to help them to produce well achieved projects (and provide manuals to do that; an example here in French :http://www.bvh.univ-tours.fr/XML-TEI/ManuelWeb/Manuel_TEI_BVH.html) >> >> 2. Or, there are not so numerous nests like NTG-Context discussion list ! How to help Jürgen (and scholars generally) who knock at the door looking for an analysis of their needs and questioning how ConTeXt may help them ? >> >> a) They have to learn TEI XML, then >> >> b) learn Context stylesheet ! >> >> Is it possible to gather a group of people interested by these topics ? Are we starting today ? > ___________________________________________________________________________________ > If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! > > maillist :ntg-context@ntg.nl /http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context > webpage :http://www.pragma-ade.nl /http://context.aanhet.net > archive :https://bitbucket.org/phg/context-mirror/commits/ > wiki :http://contextgarden.net > ___________________________________________________________________________________ -- Jean-Pierre Delange Ancients&Moderns