Features of the electronic version

Post date: Feb 11, 2016 8:30:44 PM

As a member of the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing, I was keen that the electronic version of the book (available on the Oxford Scholarship Online website, Kindle, eBook and so on) should take full advantage of its medium. The electronic book therefore boasts the following additional features:

    • All external hyperlinks are live on devices which are connected to the internet, so you can go directly to the websites where they are mentioned in the text.
    • This is particularly useful for the Catalogue of Manuscripts (chapter 10), where links are given to full digitisations made available by host institutions. Several of the images reproduced in the book can also be viewed in colour and high-resolution by clicking on the links in the captions below.
    • The images can be viewed in higher resolution by double-clicking on them.
    • The text is fully searchable, and the size and format of the display can be varied (depending on the device).
    • The Table of Contents and every footnote are encoded as internal hyperlinks, to aid navigation. (To return to the main text after clicking on the hyperlinked footnote reference number, click on the reference number in the list of footnotes.)
    • All bibliographical references are also hyperlinked to the Bibliography: just click on the date of publication to see full details of each work. (To return to the main text, on the Kindle at least, press the ⧀ button at the bottom left of the screen.)
    • Almost every manuscript siglum which appears in the text is also hyperlinked to the Catalogue of Manuscripts (chapter 10). Click on the blue siglum to go to the corresponding entry with full details of that witness. (Again, the ⧀ button takes you back to where you were.)
    • All four indices are completely hyperlinked so that you can go to each page listed under every heading. Users may find this particularly helpful with regard to the Index of Manuscripts (ordered by location), where the bold numbers link to the entry in the Catalogue of Manuscripts or an image in the book. This is even the case in the Kindle version where the original page numbers are not preserved.

I hope that all of this adds to the utility of the book, and I am particularly grateful to OUP and SPI Global for agreeing to implement these features. Of course, neither they nor I take responsibility for the functioning of particular devices or external sites. Nevertheless, in addition to the present page, I also maintain a site of resources to complement the book at www.vetuslatina.org.