Customization
Because the TEI Guidelines must cover such a broad domain and user community, it is essential that they be customizable: both to permit the creation of manageable subsets that serve particular purposes, and also to permit usage in areas that the TEI has not yet envisioned. Customization is a central aspect of TEI usage and the Guidelines are designed with customization in mind.
The TEI provides a number of basic, general-purpose customizations. One of the best-known of these is TEI Lite, which was originally designed as a demonstration of the customization mechanism, but has become popular as a simple TEI schema for basic encoding. Other basic customizations are listed below. To create your own customization, you can do one of the following:
- Use the Roma web tool to select TEI modules, add and delete elements, and make other choices.
- Write and maintain your own customization by hand using the TEI ODD language. For tutorials and guidance on how to do this, see
- Getting Started with P5 ODDs
- TEI Customization Primer by Syd Bauman and Julia Flanders, Women Writers Project
- Module 8: Customising the TEI, ODD, Roma in TEI by Example.
- Lou Burnard's resources:
- How to make an ODD automagically
- How to Update your ODD (especially for older ODDs produced before version 3.0 of the TEI Guidelines)
- ODD chaining for Beginners
- “Customizing the TEI” in What Is the Text Encoding Initiative?, OpenEdition Press, 2014,
- Using the TEI (Chapter 24 of the Guidelines)
Customizations provided by the TEI Consortium
| Customization | Description | Formats |
|---|---|---|
| Lite | TEI Lite, the most widely used TEI customization; includes basic elements for simple documents | ODD, DTD, RNG, XSD, HTML, PDF |
| TEI Tite | A constrained customization designed for use by keyboarding vendors | ODD, DTD, RNG, XSD, HTML, PDF |
| TEI simplePrint | An entry-level customization, focused primarily on the needs of those encoding Western European early modern printed material | ODD, DTD, RNG, XSD, HTML, PDF |
| jTEI Article | A highly-constrained customization intended for creating journal articles, in particular for submission to the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative | ODD |
| Bare | TEI Absolutely Bare, a very barebones schema with the absolute minimum of elements | ODD, DTD, RNG, XSD |
| All | TEI with all modules included | ODD, DTD, RNG, XSD |
| Corpus | TEI for Linguistic Corpora, includes the modules for encoding linguistic corpora, ODD, DTD, RNG, XSD | |
| MS | TEI for Manuscript Description, includes the elements for describing manuscripts and complex physical aspects of documents | ODD, DTD, RNG, XSD |
| Drama | TEI with Drama, includes the TEI drama module | ODD, DTD, RNG, XSD |
| Speech | TEI for Speech Representation, includes the TEI module for spoken language | ODD, DTD, RNG, XSD |
The following customizations use features which are not available in the DTD and XSD schema formats.
| Customization | Description | Formats |
|---|---|---|
| Odds | TEI for authoring ODD, includes the TEI module for creating ODD files and customizations | ODD, RNG |
| allPlus | TEI with with all modules included, plus all external additions | ODD, RNG |
| TEI + SVG | TEI with SVG | ODD, RNG |
| TEI + Math | TEI with MathML | ODD, RNG |
| TEI + XInclude | TEI with XInclude | ODD, RNG |
Customizations provided by the TEI community
Below are customizations that have been created by members of the TEI community. To have your customization listed, please contact web@tei-c.org.
Best Practices for TEI in Libraries
- A guide for mass digitization, automated workflows, and promotion of interoperability with XML using the TEI (ODD files)
EpiDoc: Epigraphic Documents in XML
- A customization for encoding epigraphic materials (Guidelines, GitHub site, ODD, RNG).
TEI with Music Notation
- A customization allowing use of elements from the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI).
Please see the customizations category of the TEI wiki for more customizations and more about the customization process.