Collation

[uliska]

In scholarly editing one of the steps of fundamental preparation is the collation of sources. This step determines all the different readings between the sources. In order to be manageable the number of relevant sources is reduced if there are too many available, and one source is defined to be the master.

Collation means marking any difference between a given source from the master source, for each and every note and grob. Typically this is done by writing these differences into the master source (well, a copy thereof ...), using different colours for the different sources.

It would be great for scholarLY to support collation as an engraving mode. That would mean that choice would not select one source to be used for printing but would print the master source in regular black and would print the differences on top of that in various colours.

I assume the engraving part of this could become tricky because it would require some non-standard notation hacking since I can't imagine that simply wrapping the readings in a polyphonic expression would work.

Apart from that I think this should be preceded by an at least initial implementation of a source module where more extensive source descriptions can be encoded and source can be referenced through symbol? keys.

The interface could be an option scholarly.choice.collate taking a list of source references, with the first being treated as the master source. Another way could be to encode the status directly in the source description, but I think this configuration should be independent from the encoding of lemma vs. reading.