User Guide
The Texts Menu
The published texts are grouped in three target categories:
- Franciscan A manuscripts
- New diplomatic editions
- Texts no longer readily accessible.
Texts from the Franciscan manuscripts are listed according to manuscript number. In the second group, texts are sorted according to manuscript, with manuscripts presented in alphabetical order. Texts from early books and periodicals follow, in chronological order according to date of publication of source. Sources are alphabetically listed.
The title of each text is linked to three different files, labelled Header, Text and XML. Where a translation is supplied, links will likewise be provided to its Header, Text and XML files.
The Header file contains editorial information about the text and about the mark-up used in its creation.
The Text file contains the text itself in electronic form.
The XML file contains the complete encoding of the text in XML mark-up, according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).
Layout of Texts
To facilitate cross-referencing with DIL, our texts mimic as closely as possible the format of the printed original. Hence our digital editions follow the line breaks of the printed originals, except where they occur in the middle of a word, or in the middle of a line of verse. In such cases we place the line break after the end of the word or line of verse. In diplomatic editions, line-breaking follows that of the manuscript.
Text titles
The titles of the electronic texts are those of their source, whether printed or manuscript. Editors frequently provided titles in their own languages; for example many of Kuno Meyer’s editions are titled in German.
In the case of verse texts which lack individual titles in the printed original, the incipit has been used as the title of the text in the electronic edition.
The titles of electronic texts edited diplomatically from manuscript originals have been supplied by the editor, and indicated by square brackets, in cases where a title is lacking in the manuscript.
Representation of Mark-up
Because HTML has only limited capacity for displaying the subtleties of TEI mark-up, the following editorial conventions have been adopted for display purposes:
- Editorial macrons are retained in the XML mark-up but have been omitted from the HTML display in order to facilitate searching.
- e with an ogonek (i.e. ‘ę’) is used to represent MS tall e in the XML encoding, but to facilitate searching is represented in the HTML display by ordinary e.
- The punctum delens used over certain consonants to indicate lenition is represented in the HTML display by a following h and underlining; thus ċ is represented as ch. Underlining is omitted only in those texts in which the punctum is the sole means of indicating lenition.
- Insular ampersand (‘Tironian et’) is displayed as &
- The Latin abbreviation for vel is displayed as nó
- Editorial emendations and readings of which there are variants in other manuscripts are hyperlinked. Clicking these links will display the emendations/readings in a pop-up window.
- Words and phrases in a language other than that of the main text are displayed in bold font.
- Expansions of manuscript abbreviations are displayed in italics.
- Text supplied by the editor is enclosed between [square brackets].
- (Underlining between regular brackets) indicates text deleted by the editor.
- Manuscript foliation/pagination is provided for all texts. Printed editions vary in the manner in which this is represented. TLH has established a uniform policy in which the page/folio number is followed (where applicable) by a letter indicating the particular column of text.
Viewing the XML files
An XSL stylesheet is used to style the XML files for display, but the quality of the display will vary according to the capability of different browsers. Browser variations are as follows:
- Microsoft Internet Explorer: certain characters (such as f and s with punctum delens) will not display at all, and are replaced by a hollow square like this: □
- Mozilla Firefox: all character entities used by TLH are correctly displayed in this browser. Hence Firefox is the best browser for viewing the XML files. However, Firefox will invariably display an error message unless the user has the TLH DTD saved locally (drop the DTD into your Mozilla Firefox\res\dtd folder). Without the DTD, you can still use Firefox to view the XML encoding, despite the error message; simply right click and view source.
- Netscape: the display engine of this browser can toggle between Internet Explorer and Firefox. For best results, select Firefox display.
- Opera: this browser cannot display the (styled) XML file, since Opera cannot manage XSLT. Clicking an XML link from the published texts menu will instead deliver a white screen with the message XSLT processing failed! However, the unstyled original mark-up is still available to Opera users and may be accessed by right-clicking on the white screen and selecting source from the range of available options.
To see original XML tags and encoding in all browsers, right-click and select view source. The mark-up is then displayed.
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