[XeTeX] (Xe)LaTeX output in a non-(Xe)LaTeX scholarly community

Dominik Wujastyk wujastyk at gmail.com
Sat Oct 23 18:55:06 CEST 2010


That was Prof. Max Muller (professor of Philology) and his critical edition
of the Rg Veda.  :-)

On 23 October 2010 18:41, Gareth Hughes <garzohugo at gmail.com> wrote:

> On the matter of declining skills in typesetting I'm reminded of an
> Oxford apocryphon of a printer who was preparing a Sanskrit grammar. The
> printer contacted the author, an esteemed professor, with a crucial
> error in the Sanskrit text. The professor first felt angry at being
> questioned on matters of Sanskrit by a printer, but verified the
> reported the error in his own copy. Returning to the printer he asked
> how he'd managed to spot the error. The printer replied that, after
> setting pages and pages in a script he could not read, he had learnt
> that one of them never follows one of them! Ah... attention to detail;
> they don't make them like that anymore!
>
> Gareth.
>
> John Was wrote:
> > Well I'm still in the Press once a week at least (for choir practice!)
> > so I shall make sure these comments reach the right ears.  They
> > correspond, unfortunately to my own impression.  Leofranc
> > Holford-Strevens works heroically on critical editions but he is the
> > sole in-house editor left and can't possibly handle them all.  I think
> > he is pretty well full-time on large projects with extensive commentary
> > (and still finds time to publish and lecture extensively on an
> > astonishing range of topics).
> >
> > Getting back to TeX-related matters, the hyphenation patterns available
> > in XeTeX (even to 'plain' users like myself) are an enormous help, even
> > if I disagree with the English at frequent points (the Latin rarely lets
> > me down, aside from a few rogues - is hucusque one? - which I guess are
> > analagous to Knuth's 'manuscript' in refusing to comply with the
> > algorithms).  No one bothers to read people like Priscian on what should
> > be done with Greek and Latin, and no one at OUP involved in passing
> > proofs would have the faintest idea about this subject.  Neither, alas,
> > do authors - with the Dictionary of Medieval Latin (which I have just
> > relinquished with completion of Fascicule XIII in the middle of letter
> > 'R') it was left entirely to me, and I fear that laxity in this matter
> > will pervade future fascicules as it did in some of those that preceded
> > my involvement.  When I asked the compilers  to keep a look-out for any
> > bad hyphenations that I might have missed in perusing and correcting the
> > proofs, they asked me to explain the rules!
> >
> > John
> >
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message ----- From: <jherrman at allegheny.edu>
> > To: <xetex at tug.org>
> > Sent: 23 October 2010 15:05
> > Subject: Re: [XeTeX] (Xe)LaTeX output in a non-(Xe)LaTeX scholarly
> > community
> >
> >
> >> Yes, as you would guess, the copy-editor marked up my files by hand
> >> and sent me the hard copy.
> >>
> >> Recent OUP critical editions in Greek prose could use a lot more
> >> copy-editing; I would assert that their production standards in this
> >> area have fallen drastically in the last decade. We have new editions
> >> of the Greek orators Demosthenes and Lysias in the Oxford Classical
> >> Text series, all filled with rampant flaws in hyphenation and line
> >> numbering in the apparatus. Reviews have also identified numerous
> >> slips of a more substantial nature, that seem to suggest very little
> >> copy-editing is happening on these in house. It seems that OUP has
> >> adopted new modes of production for these critical editions that
> >> create these problems, and authors (and copy-editors?) don't regularly
> >> take the time to fix it all. I know in the case of my book the
> >> copy-editor, who was otherwise very attentive, didn't seem to have
> >> looked at the Greek at all.
> >>
> >> The other major series of critical texts in Greek (and Latin), on the
> >> other hand, the Bibliotheca Teubneriana, has been shuffled from one
> >> publisher to another in the last decade. It's now in the hands of De
> >> Gruyter, who seems devoted to its revitalization. They're requiring
> >> all editors to submit camera-ready-copy, and recommending that they
> >> use Critical Edition Typesetter (<http://www.karas.ch/cet/>). I have
> >> the impression they only really care about the appearance of the CRC,
> >> though, and wouldn't really care if authors prefer other typesetting
> >> systems.
> >>
> >> Jud Herrman
> >>
> >>
> >> On 2010-10-23, John Was
> >> <john.was at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> >>> OUP will normally be amenable if saving money is in prospect!  I
> >>> think the
> >>> barrier here has always been the copy-editing process (now more
> >>> vulnerable
> >>> since house style is not seen as so important and indeed there is no
> >>> longer
> >>> any copy-editing department at OUP).  A critical edition will normally
> >>> require a rather small amount of copy-editing, though there is still
> the
> >>> introduction and commentary to consider - but if a TeX-savvy author is
> >>> willing to implement those copy-editing changes and suggestions s/he
> >>> agrees
> >>> with, there is no real difficulty.  The copy-editor would then
> >>> presumably
> >>> work by pen(cil) on a draft PDF printout in the traditional way (or by
> >>> annotating the PDF electronically, which can be tedious).
> >>>
> >>> Or of course one can simply trust the author not to make any mistakes
> at
> >>> all, and forgo copy-editing.  Even twenty years ago this was
> >>> mentioned as a
> >>> possibility at OUP but no one dared to do it in my time there.
> >>>
> >>> But I hope this doesn't become too much of a trend or I'll have to
> >>> look for
> >>> something else to do!  In the meantime, I must dust down my old brown
> >>> OCT of
> >>> Hyperides...
> >>>
> >>> John
>
>
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