4-lisp
About programming in Common Lisp, my language of choice, generally underappreciated, usually misunderstood. Explorations of the current state of the art, random thoughts, and perhaps once in a while something useful.
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.
This report describes the development of a TEI-conformant SGML edition of the Rus' Primary Chronicle (Povest' vremennykh let) on the basis of an electronic transcription of the text that originally had been prepared for paper publication using troff. The present report also discusses strategies for browsing, indexing and querying the resulting SGML edition. Selected electronic files developed for this project are available at a web site maintained by the author.