VEGEST — Vienna Encoding Guidelines for Editing Sanskrit Texts — is the name of the IKGA’s effort to develop a set of guidelines for editing works produced in the tradition of Sanskrit literary culture. These guidelines come with a versatile software toolkit that facilitates the integration of the VEGEST standard into running editorial projects and the production of high-quality publications from the encoded texts.
The special focus of VEGEST is to define solutions for digital editions of the texts produced within the logico-epistemological tradition of Buddhism. VEGEST will result in a tool for harmonising the editions of texts that are relevant to several of the IKGA’s core research areas (see STTAR, for example). Texts that fall within the scope of VEGEST have several characteristics in common: they are usually preserved in a very small number of Sanskrit manuscripts, often only in a single one. The text will often have a history that crosses linguistic boundaries (especially into Classical Tibetan). Moreover, the texts generally have complex relations to other texts.
In order to provide reliable guidelines for encoding the characteristic features of these texts, VEGEST is based on the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). VEGEST will primarily result in two formal specifications that define how to encode diplomatic and critical editions, respectively. These specifications define a subset of the extensive TEI vocabulary for encoding digital texts. Both specifications will be accompanied by natural language documentation and extensive examples. To achieve this, VEGEST will draw on the experience made in the SARIT project, as well as on standards developed in related fields.
In addition to the documented guidelines themselves, the IKGA is developing two reference implementations that complement the guidelines: one is a set of tools to facilitate the conversion from typical sources (mainly, Open Document Format for Office Applications and LaTeX) into a VEGEST compliant XML document. The other companion programme is a library of functions to generate print-ready PDFs and good quality HTML files from VEGEST encoded documents.
The guidelines themselves are to be released under a CC-BY-SA licence, the software under the GPLv3.