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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 May 2014
In 1990 Jean Boyd and I began work on an edition of the works of Nana Asma'u. If not a trail of tears, finishing this proved at least to be an odyssey, taking two or three times as long as we had optimistically anticipated. In hopes of making it easier for others to be more realistic, we provide a brief account of this sojourn.
Adam Jones, and especially, Knut Vikør, have provided extensive guidelines for scholars working with Arabic manuscripts and preparing them for camera ready copy. Most of the technology they describe is suited to use with Macintosh PCs, and for a long time it has been Macintosh users who have been best able to deal with Arabic script and Arabic diacriticals in the transliterated form. The comments offered here reflect experience with a PC using WP 5.2 in DOS beginning in 1990. At the time, the massive size of our collection—and the need to reproduce Arabic, Hausa, and Fulfulde in WP 5.2—meant that we faced a different set of problems than those considered by others in the field using Macintoshes. Without an upgrade to WP 6.1 Windows very late in the process, this project could not have been completed satisfactorily.
1 But it was not this simple: first there were innumerable telephone calls to editors and scholars, through which we explained the dilemma, inquired about production approaches, and learned a great deal about how little we—or the publishing world at large—were prepared to render in print suuch a formidable collection of original manuscripts. The grant proposal was a last resort, not an initial idea.
2 To verify the accuracy of these transliterations, each was approved by an official “reading” in the field by a scholar qualify to speak to the varacity of the work in its new form.
