Samewords

Word disambigutaion in critical text editions

In critical textual editions notes in the critical apparatus are normally made to the line where the words occur. This leads to ambiguous references when a critical apparatus note refers to a word that occurs more than once in a line. For example:

We have a passage of text here, such a nice place for a critical
note.

----
1 a] om. M

It is very unclear which of three instances of "a" the note refers to.

Reledmac is a great LaTeX package that facilitates typesetting critical editions of prime quality. It already provides facilities for disambiguating identical words, but it requires the creator of the critical text to mark all potential instances of ambiguous references manually (see the reledmac handbook for the details on that). Samewords automates this step for the editor.

Install and usage

pip3 install samewords

That's it!

This requires Python 3.6 installed in your system. For more details on installation, see the [installation]{role="ref"} section.

Now call the script with the file you want annotated as the only argument to get the annotated version back in the terminal.

samewords my-awesome-edition.tex

This will send the annotated version to stdout. To see that it actually contains some \sameword{} macros, you can try running it through grep:

samewords my-awesome-edition.tex | grep sameword

You can define a output location with the --output option:

samewords --output ~/Desktop/test/output my-awesome-edition.tex

This will check whether ~/Desktop/test/output is a directory or a file. If it is a directory, it will put the file inside that directory (with the original name). If it is a file, it will ask you whether you want to overwrite it. If it is neither a directory nor a file, it will create the file output and write the content to that.

Alternatively regular unix redirecting will work just as well in a Unix context:

samewords my-beautiful-edition.tex > ~/Desktop/test/output.tex

See more in the documentation.