Ross 1988 — re-typeset edition (work in progress)
Re-typesetting Fiona Ross's 1988 SOAS Ph.D. thesis The Evolution of the Printed Bengali Character from 1778 to 1978 from the ProQuest scan into a searchable PDF.
Quick start
make image # build the toolchain container (TeX Live/XeLaTeX, poppler, tesseract, python)
make check # consistency checks
make build # → ross-1988-retypeset.pdf (previous version archived in older-versions/)
Continue the conversion with Claude Code from this directory: it reads CLAUDE.md,
PLAN.md, CONTINUATION.md; /batch, /verify and /status are provided in .claude/commands/.
Layout
| Path | What |
|---|---|
source/10731406.pdf |
the scan (ProQuest), untouched |
src/preamble.tex, src/colophon.tex, src/pages/pNNNN.tex |
one file per original page (NNNN = PDF page) |
plates/ |
plate images cropped from the scan at native 300 dpi |
fonts/ |
Tiro Bangla (OFL) |
tools/ |
prep.sh (raster+OCR scaffold), ocr2tex.py (draft), crop_plate.py, check.py |
manifest.tsv |
page-by-page ledger: PDF page → printed page, kind, status, file |
PLAN.md / CONTINUATION.md / QUESTIONS.md / CLAUDE.md |
design · resume point · open readings · working rules |
older-versions/ |
every superseded PDF and preamble |
scans/, work/ |
scratch (regenerable; excluded from the archive) |