bdeshiandClaude Opus 5
1979450c82
ScholaX read as too decorative (Sammay), and the font metrics agree: of the faces considered it sets the smallest lowercase relative to its capitals — x-height/cap 0.645 against XCharter's 0.717 — so its caps and ascenders dominate while the lowercase does the reading. Chosen on measured grounds, not taste alone. All 35 non-ASCII characters this text uses are covered; the dots-below transliteration set (ḍ ḥ ṃ ṅ ṇ Ṛ ṛ ṣ ṭ) disqualifies ETbb, Domitian, STEP and Tempora, which are otherwise reasonable book faces. Real small caps and oldstyle figures confirmed present, so the acronym setting is unaffected. XCharter ships with TeX Live, so no font is added. Erewhon was the runner-up until the metrics showed its x-height is smaller than the current face, which would have moved readability the wrong way. Bengali needed no manual adjustment: Scale=MatchLowercase re-derives Tiro Bangla from the main font's x-height, and the Bengali-to-Latin height ratio measured off the Scheme of Transliteration held at 2.12 -> 2.08 across the switch, within the ±1px noise of a 300 dpi read. 455 pages, down from 470. Underfull boxes 123 -> 84: XCharter's narrower set gives the line-breaker more room at the same measure. Zero overfull, zero font warnings, reprocheck 0 tokens short. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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) |