handling of brackets

[floriandk]

Rather pondering than suggesting...

Processing

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[series={A},nofamiliar,noeledsec,noledgroup]{reledmac}

\begin{document}

\beginnumbering
\pstart
Some
\edtext{text}{%
    \Afootnote{words.}} 
and some more te[xt but partly un]readable.
This will cause \edtext{problems}{%
    \Afootnote{difficulties}} later.
\pend
\endnumbering 

\end{document}

will give

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[series={A},nofamiliar,noeledsec,noledgroup]{reledmac}

\begin{document}

\beginnumbering
\pstart
Some
\edtext{\sameword[1]{text}}{%
    \Afootnote{words.}} 
and some more \sameword{te[xt} but partly un]readable.
This will cause \edtext{problems}{%
    \Afootnote{difficulties}} later.
\pend
\endnumbering 

\end{document}

This is the expected behaviour in line with that "[]" are considered punctuation.

There are two problems with this -- depending on the expected behaviour for numbering:

• reledmac will not process a single "[" in a \sameword-macro. The second run of the resulting code will break off. This should probably be changed in reledmac at one point. In the meantime I could use \char"005B instead, but then "text" in the apparatus will not be numbered as reledmac considers text and te\char"005B{}xt to be two different words.

• Some editors will prefer not to consider two words with critical brackets (e.g. "Juli[us]" and "Julius") to be the same word. Is there a way to remove characters from the list of punctuation-characters other than changing the settings.py file directly? Would this cause problems in other contexts?

Do you have any advice/suggestions on how to handle this?

[stenskjaer]

Good points about the brackets. I will check if there is a better way to set the punctuation and I'll have to get back to you with some deep thoughts on what to do with the "some text [with brackets] inside text" later ;)

[stenskjaer]

Okay, I have given this a bit of thought.

I think it would be possible to have two propertiese in the settings: include_punctuation and exclude_punctuation or similar. The first adds the characters to the punctuation set, while the second removes them. In this way you could define what should be added and removed from the punctuation list.

If the editor wants to distinguish bestween "Julius" and "Juli[us]", then "[" and "]" can be removed from the punctuation set. If they should be identical, then \char"005B and the code for the opposite character could be added to the punctuation set.

The problem about \sameword{te[xt} not compiling, is there another way around that than using the character codes as suggested? Normally I would also consider making for example \secl{} and \add{} macros for adding these editorial characters as a macro, because then you can change what character you use in one place. But of course that give a wrong result because of the overlap with the sameword macro.

Maybe writing \sameword{te{[}xt} can compile in reledmac?