# Abstract
A digital edition should provide a full text search solution. However, this might pose a challenge to those digital manuscript editions that cannot edit the content of the manuscripts as linear text. As the word ordering of non-linear texts is not reliable, full text searches might either fail to return many relevant results or return many irrelevant results, thus making it impossible to find what is relevant.
The digital manuscript edition "Der späte Nietzsche" (that corresponds to the print edition //KGW IX//) faces this problem because the edition does not aim to construct a linear text by interpreting the content of the manuscripts, rather it presents the content of the manuscripts as topological transkriptions. Nevertheless, users should be able to search these manuscripts for phrases that they might know from Nietzsche's published work. Therefore, the digital edition has to provide a solution for this problem.
We will propose a two step solution that relies on multiple pseudo-linear texts of a manuscript page on the one hand and a ranking strategy by topological proximity on the other hand.