Résumé en anglais

A critical edition takes into account all the different known versions of the same text in order to show the differences between any two distinct versions. The construction of a critical edition is a long and, sometimes, tedious work. Some software that help the philologist in such a task have been available for a long time for the European languages. However, such software does not exist yet for the Sanskrit language because of its complex graphical characteristics that imply computationally expensive solutions to problems occurring in text comparisons. This paper describes the Sanskrit characteristics that make text comparisons different from other languages, presents computationally feasible solutions for the elaboration of the computer assisted critical edition of Sanskrit texts, and provides, as a byproduct, a distance between two versions of the edited text. Such a distance can then be used to produce different kinds of classifications between the texts.