The TEI is a comparatively large encoding language with several hundred elements used to represent everything from line breaks to title pages. One of the most challenging things for the novice about learning TEI is knowing where to look things up; the TEI Guidelines themselves are divided into chapters that reflect the overall organization of the TEI schema, but these divisions are not necessarily obvious to someone coming to the TEI for the first time.
This section of the WWP’s Guide describes the details of encoding and the specific elements used. We’ve divided the entries here into conceptual groupings as described below. For each grouping we provide a general overview and links to the specific entries that fall under its rubric. Some entries may appear in more than one grouping.
- text structure: elements that express the large-scale structure of the text as a whole, including its organization into sections
- prose: elements that are common to prose texts (though they may be used in other contexts as well)
- letters and similar documents: elements that are used in the encoding of letters, diaries, logs, and other documents that are organized using time and place as a governing structure
- verse: elements used in the encoding of poetry
- drama: elements used in the encoding of drama
- phrase-level encoding: elements used to encode individual words and phrases, such as names, emphasis, and foreign-language words.
- transcription and editing: elements used to capture details arising in the transcription process, such as illegibility, typographical errors in the original, abbreviations, and related issues
- rendition: encoding practices that concern the representation of the appearance of the source document
- reference structures: elements used in encoding informational structures used to reference parts of the text, such as page numbers and signatures
- notes and annotations: elements used to represent notes and annotations of all kinds in the source text
- physical document structures: elements used to represent aspects of the physical document, such as pagination, collation, and damage