There is no longer, I am told, any need to collate manuscripts against a base text. Instead they should be transcribed into a computer by touch typing supported by the use of “hypertext” methods to accommodate any ancillary comment the editor might wish to record. When his transcriptions are complete, or at any appropriate stage in the process of collation, the editor would have the computer compare the transcriptions and print out the results in any way that seemed useful. Unfortunately, the manuscript traditions of classical texts do not normally lend themselves to this sort of treatment for many reasons, but most obviously because the suggested method involves feeding into a computer a diplomatic edition of every manuscript deemed worthy of collation, as a preliminary to “letting the computer make the comparisons.”