Frans and Astrid have already noted TUSTEP. I can add this: a few years ago, I used it to produce a working edition of Book V of Eriugena's Periphyseon for Edouard Jeauneau. It is a program set up in modules that allows for the most minute manipulation of the text. I have only really used it for collation and the automatic generation of apparatus criticus. It assumes a recensionist approach: only 2 manuscripts at a time for collation; but the actual number of witnesses that you can add to the mix is limitless. It's great for catching your own mistakes in transcription! After using the program to clean up my transcriptions, I was able to produce the text with apparatus in about 40 minutes - back in the days when a 286 was about as fast as it got!
There's no question that the kind of flexibility and power that this kind of program demonstrates has its price: to produce a collation, the editor must write a program in what is very close to command language. The basic text editor in the program is a line editor, into which your files must be read for further manipulation. As I understand it, there is now a macro for inserting SGML tags according to the protocols of the Text Encoding Initiative. Each fall, there is a 2-week (if I remember correctly) seminar at Tuebingen to introduce users into the mysteries of the program. The latest version runs under Windows, LINUX and UNIX. No Mac version, sorry. You can check out the website at: http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/zdv/tustep.
The program is used by many of the German academic publishing houses, especially to generate indices and bibliographies. I've talked Frans into using the program to help us produce an edition of Andrew of St. Victor's commentary on the Minor Prophets: within the next few months, I should be able to say more about that!
Mark A. Zier
University of the Pacific
tel. 209-946-2325
fax 209-946-2821
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