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“This Will (Not) Be Handled by the Press:” Problems—and Their Solution—in Preparing Camera-Ready Copy for The Collected Works of Nana Asma'u, 1793–1864

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.