critical edition

[pauline]

Dear all

I am trying - so far in vain - to turn my normal footnotes into a proper critical apparatus. For this, I would need to be able to create a section for foot notes without any reference number in the text.
Is this possible?

thanks

[Bulow]

Let me try to understand: you have written an edition, presumably of a longish text, and put the critical notes as footnotes. Now you want to reduce this to a traditional page on paper, like e.g. an Oxford Classical Text, with no references in the text and the app. crit. at the bottom of every page and notes identified with line numbers on the page above. Is this it? I can see several objections to this. First footnotes must, by definition, have an anchor-point in the main text, otherwise they are not footnotes. Secondly you will loose a lot of space and paper, since footnotes take up at least one line each, while a traditional app. crit. is written without line-breakes and takes up much less room. You may have to do this manually, moving the text of every note into the critical apparatus and then suppressing the note as note. Rather you than me, if I may say so.
Perhaps someone else has a better idea?

[Timotheus]

No, Pauline, this is not possible: not with Mellel, nor with Word or any other conventional word processor. No word processor was ever designed for similar things. Please don't waste your time trying to square the circle.

For what you want, there are only two possibilities:
- Classical Text Editor (see here (not cheap, and Windows only; so when working on a Mac, you'll need an emulation program)
- LaTeX: see for instance here.

If I were you, I would choose LaTeX, which may seem rather laborious in the beginning; but within a couple of weeks you'll get used to it, and it will give you exactly what you want, at no cost.

[farcas]

I've been interested in the same thing. I wanted to change the reference style so that no number or letter showed up in the text body. Here's an idea for a work around: You can control the style for the note in the text body and make it invisible when you go to print it. You could also make it very small so the layout does not change too significantly.

Just a thought.

Overall, I'd love to see more sophistication with footnotes/endnotes. See previous post: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3178

Thanks!