Subject: Re: tc-list Collate

From: "James R. Adair" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 1997 13:41:25 -0500 (EST)

Vincent Broman said:

>Thanks kindly for the URL.  Unfortunately, the blurbs there are rather
>uninformative about what the program's capabilities are (or else they are
>informative but it is not very capable).
>

>One is left entirely in the dark about what the inputs to the program
>are, aside from scholarly keystrokes.  Input of Texts? Collations? how
>many at a time? in what formats? the same formats as supported for output? 
>In what alphabets and with what lexical analysis rules? With markup or
>only bare text? 

>Does the program filter or edit collations? separate or merge points of
>variation? output subset collations? support a turing-complete scripting
>language? run in batch mode? perform regularizations by rule?
>classify variants as significant/insignificant?  organize variants with
>sub-variants, sub-sub-variants?  etc.

Here's a more informative URL: 
http://slate.blue.dmu.ac.uk/projects/Collate.  From this page you can get
quite a bit more information about the program.  Peter Robinson is the
head of the Textual Criticism work group of the Text Encoding Initiative,
and his text of the Canterbury Tales, for which he wrote Collate, is
tagged in TEI.  For the really gory details, you might want to look at his
book _The Transcription of Primary Textual Sources Using SGML_, Office for
Humanities Communication Publications, no. 6 (Oxford: Oxford University
Computing Services, 1994). 

I've just run across a Perl script called tdiff that does some simple
collations, too, that some might be interested in.  For more information,
see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/etg10/tdiff.html.

Jimmy Adair
Manager of Information Technology Services, Scholars Press
    and
Managing Editor of TELA, the Scholars Press World Wide Web Site
-------------> http://shemesh.scholar.emory.edu <--------------

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From: Vincent Broman <[email-masked]>
Date: 3 Dec 1997 19:58:36 -0000

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> Here's a more informative URL:

Thanks, but I had already found my way to that.
The published stuff you mentioned might be worth my hunting up.

The tdiff description looks interestingly similar to wdiff, which is another
wrapper on diff.  Of course, the hard part which it (and wdiff and diff)
doesn't do is collate a third text against the first two.

Since I don't run any Microsoft or Apple operating systems, I am starting to
think again of embedding the guts of diff into Python and making a general
collating tool with scripting capability.  Someone send me a round tuit.

Vincent Broman                                       San Diego, California, USA
Email: broman at sd.znet.com (home)       or spawar.navy.mil or nosc.mil (work)
Phone: +1 619 284 3775                       Starship: 32d42m22s N 117d14m13s W
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