To mark a text region as element you have to insert an opening tag at the start and a closing tag at the end of the text region. In TEI a paragraph is represented by an element of type p. You type an opening tag by enclosing the element type with brackets: p. A closing tag has a slash after the first bracket: /p.

Here's an example of how you would mark up a paragraph:

Don't worry about the line breaks, the text will get reformatted anyway. The formatter knows where a paragraph ends by the /p tag and does not care about empty lines and such.

Let's do some more markup. In TEI the emph element stands for emphasized text:

In TEI the q element stands for quoted text:

Every opening tag needs a corresponding closing tag. Opening and closing tags must always nest like parentheses in a mathematical equation.

This is right:

and this is wrong:

Most elements can take attributes. Attributes are used to add specifications to elements in exactly the same way in which adjectives add specifications to nouns.

In TEI the foreign element is used to mark a passage in a foreign language. The lang attribute specifies which language it is.

The attribute name must be followed by an = and the attribute value must be put in quotes. An element can have zero or more attributes but every attribute must have a different name.

In TEI you can specify characters you don't have on your keyboard with entities. Let's see how to insert the em-dash character, that is the long dash you see in printed books. (In PG etexts that character is mostly represented by two dashes -‍- because ASCII lacks that character.)

In TEI the entity mdash represents an em-dash. Substituting mdash for -‍- makes the text look more professional.

Entities start with an ampersand (&) and end with a semicolon (;). You can find a list of supported TEI entities in Chapter 18.

You can and should mark up a text incrementally. That is: make more than one pass over the whole text and in each pass mark up a subset of elements.

You may start marking only the most prominent text features like chapters and paragraphs. Later you make a second pass marking all italicized text. If you still want to do more, make another pass replacing all quotation marks with the q element.

TODO: a PG working group needs to codify different levels of PGTEI markup.

Most probably you will start with a TEI text automatically generated by a some program from the plain vanilla etext. Your task will then be to proof the tags inserted by the program.

One of the advantages of XML is that a program can check the markup for you. To do this you need a validator and the DTD (Document Type Definition).

You can get XML validators from here:

And here is the PGTEI DTD.

For all of you who don't want to install a validator on your own PC there is an online validation service for PGTEI. It can also convert your text to different output formats.

As primary source of information refer to by Lou Burnard and C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, June 1995, revised May 2002.

A still smaller subset of TEI is described in: by C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Document No. TEI U6, 30 Aug 1994, revised June 1995.

The complete TEI markup language (caveat emptor) is described in: by C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, and L. Burnard editors, 2002.

The homepage of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium has many other interesting stuff and links.

Language Codes: From ISO 639, revised 1989

This are the supported values for the rend attribute when applied to inline elements such as hi:

name type="ship" and rs type="ship" are output in italics.

You should use a unicode-capable editor to edit your files and save them in utf-8 encoding. If you cannot do that, you'll have to choose a different encoding and enter all characters your encoding cannot handle with XML entities. To do that, you'll have to find out the unicode code point of the character first.

You must replace these characters if they occur in your original text. This is because TEI recognizes them as special characters, eg. < and > are the start and the end of a markup tag, & is the start of an entity.

If you use the ISO-8859-1 encoding to save your TEI file, you will not be able to enter these characters directly. You can still get them if you write: Useful characters not in ISO-8859-1Useful characters not in ISO-8859-1 (continued)to get  type commentŒ OElig The OE ligature used in French texts.œ oelig The oe ligature used in French texts.Š Scaron An S with an inverted hat.š scaron An s with an inverted hat.Ÿ Yuml An Y with a diaeresis.ƒ fnof matematical function of>‍< zwj Zero-width joiner. Use: shelfzwjful to get rid of the ff ligature. Sometimes &tex; may need a little hint. See shelf‍ful vs. shelfful. Use also to make sure a word does not get broken here.> < nbsp A non-breaking space. Use: Mr.nbspSherlock Holmes> < ensp A space the size of an n.> < emsp A space the size of an m. A typografical quad.> < thinsp A thin space. May be appropriate between quotes. Note: the program inserts a thin space between quotes automatically if you mark up quotes using the q tag.– ndash Use between numbers. Eg: 1914ndash18 The great war of 1914–18.— mdash Use instead of -‍- &qdash; qdash Use instead of -‍-‍-‍-. A quote dash or two-em dash is used to indicate missing letters: Mr. P&qdash; woke up.‘ lsquo ’ rsquo ‚ sbquo “ ldquo ” rdquo „ bdquo † dagger ‡ Dagger • bull bullet… hellip Horizontal ellipsis. Use instead of three dots. Note how the ellipsis dots are spaced farther apart than if you enter three dots: ... ‰ permil ′ prime Use for coordinates.″ Prime Use for coordinates.‹ lsaquo French guillemet› rsaquo French guillemet€ euro ™ trade ♠ spades The card suites.♥ hearts ♦ diams ♣ clubs

If you are using a UNICODE-capable editor, you can just enter the characters directly.

If you have non-iso-8859-1 characters in the headings, the pdf conversion will choke. You'll have to use the index index="pdf" tag to provide an alternate heading without those special characters.

In this example the pdf converter would choke on the mdash character in the heading. Thus you have to provide an alternate heading for the pdf bookmark section.