Modularity, professionality, portability, integration are key features of the "Tuebingen University System of TExt processing Programs" TUSTEP. Its purpose is to serve as a toolbox for those academic fields where texts (including those written in non-Latin alphabets) are the object of research.
The demonstration shows how this toolbox can be used to prepare a critical edition. It starts from automatic collation of different versions of a text, which stores all the information necessary for further processing in a file. There follow simple but powerful procedures which allow to automatically distinquish between "substantial" variants (to be listed in the apparatus) and "orthographic only" variants (probably to be discussed only in the editorial preface). The remaining "substantial" variants are then arranged by program in the order necessary for the critical apparatus and are "imported" with appropriate, SGML-style markup into the text for both automatic typesetting and for preparing a hypertext based electronic editon (based, for the demo, on HTML for inspection by a web browser).
The demostration can -- of course -- show only the "automatic" part of the work, but will also include the tools which help a scholar to gain control over the "manual", intellectual part of his work.
TUSTEP is currently available for Windows 95/98/NT and UNIX platforms (including Linux; see http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/zdv/zrlinfo/tustep.html). Beyond critical editing (see http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/zdv/zrlinfo/ed.html), typical applications include the preparation and publication of encyclopedias (like the 15-volume "Neuer Pauly", 5 volumes of which have appeared by the end of 1998), dictionaries, bibliographies, indexes and concordances (see http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/zdv/zrlinfo/reg.html).