The CNTR collation takes the texts of various witnesses to the New Testament and aligns them to each other according to a scheme optimized to display the minimum number of columns. The CNTR collation provides several improvements not normally found in other collations:
- Displays orthographical differences, scribal corrections, and the condition of characters.
- Aligned by semantical word variants based on differences in lexeme, part of speech, or morpholocial sense.
- Highlights variant patterns based on algorithmic variant boundaries.
- Provides English interlinear information so that the average user can get an idea of what the words mean.
- Generated directly from the raw manuscript data to help eliminate errors.
The collation currently only contains extant manuscript data from up to 400AD along with some modern critical texts. If the text of a witness contains different book or verse orders, the text is aligned to the traditional canonical order. The collation was computer-generated by using three different algorithms:
- The maximum text was created as a templet containing all known variants for each verse by using a recursive longest common sequence first algorithm without reference to any base text.
- Each individual witness was then aligned to this templet using a non-recursive longest common sequence algorithm considering multiple sequences.
- The resulting matrix was compressed using a gap-reducing algorithm to minimize the number of columns.
This beta version is still a work in progress and therefore remains restricted by copyright, but when it is ready for production it will be released under an open license. For more details, consult the CNTR Technical Reference.