Issues of General Sort
- Footnotes: The central problem with regards to the footnotes was to display them correctly. After the insertion of the footnotes into the main text, each of them were checked whether they worked or not on a PC and a MAC. The results were positive, but at the final review of the whole project, I found that there are still some problems that, at this point, remain unexplicable.
- Characters: The project employs a special set of characters to present the correct transliteration of the manuscript. Although most of the available characters worked well for the purposes of this electronic edition, certain characters did pose some serious problems: For instance, to display the "khw" letter of the Persian alphabet, I had to combine two separate characters to create a new one. This was due to the fact that most of the available character sets did not simply include this very special character.
- Copyright issues: The copyright of the manusctipt belongs to the Yapi Kredi Research Library in Istanbul, Turkey. According to the copyright law of the library, no part of the manuscript can be displayed publicly. Therefore the project did not include the sample images of the manuscript in Arabic script. However, the transcribed text that has been used here as the basis for the electronic version of the text is the sixth chapter of my masters thesis (2006) submitted to the Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences at Bogazici University.
- SED: To display the characters, the project employs two SED files: The first one converts new digraphs to UTF-8, and the second one converts the XML-tagged text to an HTML.
- HTML: The project mostly uses HTML files. This made me elaborate on the workings of tagging in HTML. The most challenging situation in my case was to prepare the tables to list the findings obtained from the two text analysis tools.
- Metadata: The metadata information regarding the various aspects of the footnoted text (and to a certain extent, of the actual manuscript) is provided. In the metadata information, the source of the text is made clear by a link to the library, the owner of the manuscript.