This is a major new release of the P5 Guidelines, which introduces some significant new material as well as implementing an unusually large set of other changes and error corrections. Since the last release in March 2011, members of the TEI community have proposed over 60 feature requests and reported about the same number of errors; dealing with these has kept the TEI Council busy, and most of these tickets have now been closed. Discussion of each modification and each action taken is available on the relevant Sourceforge ticket, which is also referenced in the change log, as usual.

We mention here just a few of the more notable changes carried out for this release:

1. Several new elements have been introduced to facilitate a more "document-focussed" (as opposed to "text-focussed") way of working, following extensive work within the TEI Special Interest Group on Genetic Editing and elsewhere. A new sourceDoc element can now be used to organize digital images of a source document in much the same way as the existing facsimile, but with the added ability to embed detailed source transcriptions of the source within the same structure. A number of other elements have been added or modified to support the detailed encoding of transcriptions of individual documents, and a mechanism has been defined for the encoder to represent the evolution of a text through various writing stages. The existing chapter on Physical Transcription has been exhaustively revised to cater for these revisions which will, it is hoped, go some way to improve the support offered by the TEI scheme for documentary and genetic editing.
2. The licensing conditions applicable to TEI products were changed (moving to a dual license model of CC-BY and BSD2 for most TEI outputs), and made more evident; the source code tree was tidied up, with all unused items being moved out; some old annoyances — notably the meaningless distinction between "mwa" and "opt" as properties of attributes — were removed
3. Following extensive work by the Special Interest Group in Music, a new notatedMusic element was added to support representation of musical notation within texts in a way compatible with the existing Music Encoding Initiative and MusicXML standards.
4. A number of minor changes were made to make it possible to represent dates, and normalised dates, using non-Julian calendar systems; a new attribute class was defined to facilitate provision of sort keys.
5. Several modifications were made to enhance the representation of more carefully structured or richer bibliographic entries, notably the ability to nest one bibl within another, and the ability to specify a work's language.
6. All examples were revised to drastically reduce the amount of unnecessarily divergent and encoding practices (such as the values used for the @rend attribute, or for language identifier codes)
7. The content models of some elements were relaxed as part of ongoing work to align encoding by the Text Creation Partnership to TEI P5, to permit (for example) stage directions within verse, or verse within headings.
8. The content model of the subst element was revised in line with what we believe to be good practice for this element (the only legal contents of subst are now del, add). At the same time, a new element substJoin element has been added to deal with more complex situations. It is regretted that this may result in some existing documents becoming invalid under the new schema.
9. A new spGrp (group of speeches) element has been added to represent floating div-like sequences of speeches which function as a single unit, for example "numbers" within the script of a musical or opera.

As far as possible, and in line with stated policy, none of the changes made at this release should invalidate existing documents. Rather than simply removing features or practices which are now considered erroneous, care has been taken to indicate that such features are ‘deprecated’ and may be removed at a subsequent release. Work is ongoing on how exactly to formalise this policy.