I’ve been doing a bit of a side-project for the last couple of days.
The short St Nicholas legends (reference BHL 6173 and 6175), that I have been working on, in fact derive – via the Magnum Legendarium Austriacum, of which more next week- from the sermon on St Nicholas included by Honorius of Augustodunensis in his Speculum. This is so obscure that I felt drawn to translate that sermon. I turned the Migne text into an electronic text, and then quickly found evidence that it was dodgy. The only other edition was the 1531 editio princeps, which looked rather better, so I collated the two. These differed enough that I felt obliged to consult a couple of manuscripts, chosen at random. Inevitably I ended up with a 4-way collation.
I have just finished the translation, and I will review it and upload it, with the text and collation, next week. Then it’s back to BHL 6173, although there’s not much more to do there.
Isn’t it odd that there is no obvious way to create a collation in Microsoft Word (or in this blogging tool, WordPress)?
There is a tool to collate two Word documents (Review > Compare > Compare). You can then use multiple collations vs. a base version to collate more than two with Review > Compare > Combine.
Not that sort of collation: the critical apparatus in a Latin text.
The best workaround I’ve seen for simulating a sort of traditional-looking critical apparatus using Word is the one described here:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/several-footnotes-on-one-line/9b4dbf61-2347-406a-8f25-01a11cf5f8df
Essentially, use footnotes, and hide the paragraph marks at the end of each footnote except the last on each page (Format > Hidden) so that they appear as a single paragraph. If you don’t want to clutter the main text with callouts you can hide them (define Footnote Reference style as Hidden), and then add a separator (||, extra spaces, etc.) at the end of each note. If you’re working with a prose text, you can insert automatic line numbers and use those as references, but then you will get them all messed up each time you edit the text. In that case your best option is to finish the text and apparatus, and only when you’re sure that you aren’t touching them again add the line references in the notes manually.
This is far from perfect and very error-prone, but with patience (a lot of it) you can make it look like a real apparatus.
The problem described in the link above is real: it works well for me in Word 2007, but in Office 365 I get extra blank lines for each note.
Thank you so much! But yes, that must be very hairy. I was reading through your comment, thinking “That will break in the next version of Word” and then saw that you’d found exactly that.
Evidently Microsoft does not employ classicists.