All for one low price ($0) which can fit the budget of over 70% of humanities projects in North America today.
Fortunately the fobidding reputation of the free software is largely undeserved. I put together this page because of my conviction that you should be able to -- and can -- use these tools even if your PhD isn't in software engineering but in something more environmentally friendly, like mediaeval literature or phonological theory, and also my conviction that the excellent results of a lot of hard work by dedicated individuals should be more widely known and used.
The suite is a collection of the free software tools that I have
found the most useful in my own work, configured so that they'll
work "out of the box" and cooperate with each other and with the
TEI definition files. Anyone with a basic knowledge of Windows
computing and the TEI should be able to install the suite and
begin using it with a minimum of trouble. Ideally the suite will
allow the work that scholars do more accurately reflect our
priorities, letting us spend more time on texts and less on
encoding.
Rabid Emacs supporters tend to believe that your text editor should do everything in the world. Failing that, you should be able to create add-ons that will let your text editor do everything in the world. Included in that emacs\lisp subdirectory you don't want to go into are the add-ons that will let you use Emacs to read your e-mail, download files from Singapore, solve differential equations, find out what today is according to the Mayan calendar, and pretend to psychoanalyze youself. To my knowledge, no-one has written an add-on that will fill out your tax return and electronically file it for you, but it's only a matter of time.
The Emacs monster was originally spawned by Richard Stallman and untold millions of hackers. The Windows 95/NT version is the child of Geoff Voelker. The version you have was tweaked by Michael Duggan to let it do those fancy pop-up menus and compiled with even more improvements by Andrew Innes, so you don't have to buy a Microsoft C++ compiler.
DSSSL (Document Style Semantics Specification Language) is another international standard for creating style-sheets that tell you what an SGML-tagged text ought to look like when it's printed. The Jade program can take an SGML document and a DSSSL stylesheet and spit out a nicely formatted version suitable for printing. The kinds of output that are possible for now are:
Some people have had problems with their browser changing filenames that have more than one period. If yours does this too, make sure you change the names back again after saving them. (The teisetup batch file will warn you if it can't find one of the files and will remind you what it expects the names to be.)
teisetup.bat is a plain ASCII text file. For the moment, it's in Unix's
idea of what a plain ASCII text file should look like rather than DOS's
idea, causing the usual carriage-return headaches for some people. Make
sure you download it as a text file. For example, in Netscape,
don't just hold the shift key down while clicking on the link,
rather select the link normally and when you can see the file in your
browser, explicitly save it.
Note: The Emacs archive file is a pre-release version of the next mini-release of NTEmacs, made available thanks to Andrew Innes. When version 19.34.3 becomes officially available in a couple of weeks, the link above will point to the main University of Washington server. The Jade link will probably also soon point to James Clark's site.
You should also go look at the official web-pages for:
If you're the kind of masochist who like to compile all your
programs yourself, the source code for the Emacs binaries above
is here and the
diff file here.
Create the directory TEI at the top level of your c: drive. Put all the downloaded files from above in this directory. Open a DOS box. Type:
c:
cd \TEI
teisetup
You're done. (I hope.)
Disclaimers: I've never seen an NT system in my life. This has only been tested for Windows 95. Specifically, the only computer it's guaranteed to work on is mine (a Pentium 120 with 16 meg RAM). If people find problems setting up on other systems, especially if they've found solutions that can be incorporated into the general release, please let me know.
And of course all the disclaimers you expect. I don't
guarantee it will work as promised or, for that matter, at all. If
your hard drive dies screeching in agony, it's not my fault. If your
computer goes up in smoke, the University of Manitoba will deny it's
ever met me before in its life. Most of the parts of the suite are
covered by some version of Gnu licence. It's not their fault either.
It's not the fault of the authors of the software. It's not the fault
of the Text Encoding Initiative, or of their sponsors, collaborators,
in-laws, remote cousins, distant acquaintances, or household pets.
It's not the fault of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada or of the Research Development Fund of the University of Manitoba,
whose support of the research which required me to learn all this in
the first place is gratefully acknowledged, though of course any opinions
expressed in the results of that research or in the contents of these
pages do not reflect those of SSHRCC, the U of M, or the researcher.