- Transkribus, a platform for the transcription and searching of historical documents. Transkribus is a mature program that offers powerful features for the diplomatic transcription of manuscripts. In some contexts it could help a project like ours to provide a standardized interface for a team of MS transcribers. It has many features and veers towards being a totalizing environment. At the time of writing (July 2021) the TEI export is not a good fit for use with Saktumiva.
- T-Pen, provides similar functionality to Transkribus: a team of inputters could use a convenient interface to transcript MSS diplomatically.
- Edition Visualization Technology is “a tool specifically designed to create digital editions from XML-encoded texts.” EVT reads a TEI-encoded critical edition (using parallel segmentation) and displays it with several useful add-on features. It can handle hot-linking between text and manuscript image. There is a demo available of the text of Avicenna’s Logica. The EVT2 manual notes that “experimental support for the double-end-point attached method is under way and will be added to a future version.” This may facilitate the use of EVT with the XML output of Saktumiva’s collation.
- Textual Communities, by Peter Robinson (University of Saskatchewan). Textual Communities offers a rich environment and toolset for transcribing and collating manuscripts and producing digital editions of pre-modern texts. In many ways it is similar to Saktumiva. But Textual Communities is more focussed on European-language sources and does not provide the specific Sanskrit-language features of Saktumiva. However, Textual Communities has social-network aspects that are important and it could certainly be used for an Indic-language project.
- Ekdosis, a LaTeX macro package for typesetting critical editions, similar in purpose to EDMAC (and derivatives). Ekdosis offers a rigorous syntax for manually entering one’s text and critical apparatus. But a benefit of this syntax is that output can be as a typeset PDF or as TEI XML with the apparatus expressed as parallel segmentation.
- Textgrid, an Eclipse environment developed under the aegis of the European DARIAH consortium. No new release of Textgrid has appeared since 2018. Although the descriptions of Textgrid seem to offer promise, and it shows awareness of important international standards, the documentation is poor and the purpose of the software is opaque.
- Classical Text Editor, by Stefan Hagel. CTE has a rich set of features and many people like it for text-critical work. But it is a totalizing environment, it is expensive, it runs only on Windows (the kludges for other systems are not adequate for team project work), it is closed-source, and it is written and supported by a single person.
- Brucheion, a “virtual Research Environment (VRE) to create Linked Open Data (LOD) for historical languages and the research of historical objects.” Without a manual, example projects, or screenshots it is difficult to know what this platform offers, but some users speak highly of it. It is apparently designed to be a totalizing environment.
- LEAF, an online XML validating editor, has recently (2023-05) reached a new release level and is now a viable alternative to oXygen and Visual Code editor. It has several interesting features, including the ability to edit XML files at GitHub. It is also a tool in the early stages of release cadence, and some expected features are not yet implemented. It shows enormous promise, especially for those who wish to create XML documents with minimum fuss and without learning a huge amount about XML.
- The Open Philology Editing Environment, not yet released (June 2023). Designed primarily for Tibetan and Chinese Buddhist texts. Collation perfomed by Peter Robinson’s CollateX (see Textual Communities above). Appears to capture evaluations of manuscript readings after collation. No mention of tailoring collation for the specific features of Sanskrit manuscripts, including sandhi variants, gemination, etc.