Dear all (with the familiar apologies for cross-posting),

I would like to let the list know of a tool that might relieve the textual critic of

a few grey hairs.

If you have tried making critical editions in LaTeX with the wonderful Reledmac

package (https://ctan.org/pkg/reledmac), you will know that it incorporates a

feature for handling references to one of several instances of a given word in

the same line. The challenge is that these potentially conflicting identical

words need to be annotated before the .tex file is compiled, and it is therefore

generally done manually. This is painstaking work, and even small changes in

layout may require a revision of the whole text to check for new potentially

ambiguous words.

So I am working on a script that does this for you.

It currently lives at https://github.com/stenskjaer/samewords. You can see more

in the documentation at http://samewords.readthedocs.io/.

I have worked on it intermittently for a longer period now, and it generally

runs well and handles stuff that I throw at it rather well. But it is still a

younger tool, and is therefore also still moving towards a 1.0 version. Although

I have tried putting it through as many different possible and impossible

scenarios as I can think of, there may still be some cases that it does not

handle correctly. So if you try it and find any problems, either in usability or

the results it spits out, please let me know, either via email or (preferably)

an issue on Github.

If you should have any other comments, feedback or thoughts, or just find the

solution useful I am of course all ears.

All the best,

Michael S. Christensen