[texhax] problems with critical editions [was Footnote numbering]

[Uwe Lück]

At 20:15 25.12.06, pierre.mackay wrote:

>>>It probably took me many days to discover that marks,
>>>TOC entries, penalties and vertical spaces must obey a certain
>>>order. The TeXbook passages on vertical lists must be read
>>>very diligently for this. It may need many days of suffering
>>>weird failures to achieve the appropriate degree of diligence.
>You inspire me to the same sort of research.  It could be the solution to 
>a nagging problem
>with manuscript references I have been having.   See 
>http://Angiolello.net, the transcription of
>the manuscript for the kind of thing I have in mind.  I want to key the 
>annotations to folio and line
>references and have them tracked in the page headers, so that in addition 
>to numbered pages
>I get the manuscript location that the commentary refers to.  I use marks, 
>of course, but it is
>quite possible that I could be using them more efficiently.

I take this back to texhax. Even if it is about problems that typically occur
in critical editions, the people who know how to solve the problems may not
read a list that focusses on critical editions. (Moreover, this may be a 
weapon
to get through Pierre's spam filter.)

I am just thinking of two kinds of problems that I had in a current project:

1.) Marginal notes on the wrong side. A manual page break helps
locally. (I use a variant of \pagebreak that warns in case by some
changes of the text the manual pagebreak becomes nonsensical.)
Page 3 of

     CTAN:/macros/latex/contrib/marginnote/marginnote.pdf

alludes to the problem. That marginnote package may be a remedy.
It's disadvantage is that it overlays marginal material when it comes
from the same line.

2) Marks work wrong, e.g., the heading of the next section
appears in the header of page x while the next section starts
on page x, even when I attach the \markright to the first
paragraph of the text of the next section. (Thus it even happens
if I do the things properly to which the citation above alludes.)
A manual page break helps again.

I mention these because they might occur in things
like page 2 of

     http://angiolello.net/ANG-trans.pdf

(only today I were curious enough to try some other links on
http://angiolello than those days ago) -- is my guess correct,
Pierre?

The first problem seems to be a known problem with the
LaTeX output routine. I suppose the second problem is
just another symptom of the same problem with the
LaTeX output routine (I haven't taken the time to look
for this in the LaTeX bugs database.) I have studied
parts of the output routine, but I haven't analyzed the
things I'm mentioning. I am afraid that there is no better
help than what I told above -- until LaTeX3 appears!

Concerning that proposed mailing list: the problem with
marginals may be experienced with juridical things as well,
I guess (at least with German).

Only after seeing ANG-trans.pdf and ANG-text.pdf I have
understood Pierre's posting. I have never seen this style.
No wonder, I haven't studied history or classics,
What I know about styles of critical editions is
what I have seen when working with people who
did the "critical" part of the project (I just do the
TeX-related things).

  Cheers,

   Uwe.