Hello,

I'm marking up, in OSIS, the DuTillet Manuscript of the Gospel of
Matthew. It's a Hebrew Manusript, not Greek. Every so often, a series
of dots appear above the text. It seems this is an ancient scribal
convention indicating some sort of change to the text. As such, I have
begun to mark up such instances as <transChange type="changed">[The
Hebrew Text]</transChange>. Then I follow such references with a note
element indicating exactly what text was marked by the scribe as
changed.

I realize this is probably not quite how the <transChange> element was
intended to be used. Can any of you suggest a better method to do
this? Should I instead use a custom element type such as <transChange
type="x-scribeindicateschange">[Hebrew Text]<transChange>? Or should I
use some other markup element?

Further, in the text a special ligature is used in place of the
tetragramiton. It looks sort of like a British Pound sign with three
dots forming the plot points of an equal-lateral triangle. I have
found no equivalent character (or combination of combinable
characters) in the Unicode standard. What suggestions might any of you
have in properly handling this?

During some email correspondence with Kirk Lowery, he indicated some
on the list might know of some pre-existing css style sheets for use
with OSIS. I've Googled for OSIS css style sheets -- I thought I found
one buried in the bibletechnologies site, but I can't seem to find it
again. Might any of you be willing to point me in the right direction?

Thank You,

--Jeff G.

Hi Jeff,

Jeff G. wrote:[...]

<transChange> is really intended for changes that appear in a 
translation but that have no representation in the original document. 
Since your manuscript isn't a translation, you probably shouldn't use 
<transChange>.

Unfortunately, manuscript markup hasn't yet been addressed by OSIS, so 
there's no tag explicitly intended for this purpose. However, you can 
use <seg> to mark elements that aren't yet explicitly accounted for. So 
<seg type="x-scribeIndicatesChange">[Hebrew Text]</seg> is how I
would 
do it.
[...]

You could try petitioning Unicode to add a new codepoint. :)

I would probably just encode the tetragrammaton using normal Hebrew 
codepoints and with <divineName> around it. Actually I would surround it 
with <divineName> even if there were the proper character in Unicode. 
This will allow you to do special rendering of the contents (e.g. 
replacing them with an scanned image of the special tetragrammator) if 
you want to.

(Unfortunately, I can't help with your CSS question.)

--Chris

Thank you for help Chris.

I have another question, for you as well. There are some places where
the physical manuscript is not legible. This is not common, but it
happens in a small number of places that I can think of. In the
Unicode text document that is my source these are indicated by text in
square brackets, and typically foot noted. I had been replacing
brackets with <transChange type="add"> markup. Is there a better tag
for this instance. Or, should I just be using <seg
type="x-manuscriptNotLegibleHere>[Text from some other manuscript
source, etc.]</seg> or similar instead?

Do plans exist to make OSIS more able to handle manuscript markup?
(that is, not require as many custom "x-*" tags?)

Thank you, again,

God Bless,

--Jeff G.

On 4/12/05, Chris Little <chrislit(at)crosswire.org> wrote:[...]

Jeff,

Yes, if there's something you need to mark, but there doesn't seem to be 
a tag for it, you should use <seg> and make up a type value. In most 
cases, for regular Bibles, I would say post a question to this list, 
since there is probably a correct way to do everything for those texts 
that doesn't require making up types. But with manuscript markup, that's 
the best option we have to offer.

There are plans to address manuscript markup, but I don't know the timeline.

--Chris


Jeff G. wrote:[...]

May I make a suggestion? Since Jeff is actually marking up a manuscript,
I would encourage him to not just ask for help on the things he's got
questions for, but to keep us informed about all that he's doing, and,
if he is willing, to post to the list a summary of the tagging practices
he is developing -- (1) where he is applying the OSIS core tag set in
"creative" ways; (2) new "x-*" elements and attributes for various
features that OSIS now has no facility for.

Such a discussion thread would be an excellent beginning point for the
OSIS technical committee on the design requirements needed...

Kirk

Chris Little wrote:[...][...][...]
[...]

Kirk wrote:
[...]

+1
[...]

That also means that other manuscript taggers won't "reinvent the
wheel" so to speak.

xan

jonathon[...]

Actually I want to encode manuscripts using OSIS too.
So far the markup elements that I can think of that
would be needed are:

- page beginnings and endings
- line beginnings and endings
- ambigious text and document possible interpretations
(for example if the written letter could be one of a
possible two or three letters)
- later addition by a second scribe
- markers that mark every 5/10/n number of verses
- verse numbers represented using letters of the
alphabet rather than digits (this was the way numbers
were represented in the semitic world back in the day)
- the list goes on..

-Mete

--- Jonathon Blake <jonathon.blake(at)gmail.com> wrote:[...]

You might be able to use existing OSIS elements for a few of these.

Mete Kural wrote:[...]

<milestone type="pb"/> was intended for this purpose. See the draft 
manual for usage of <milestone>: 
http://www.bibletechnologies.net/OSISUserManual21draft.dsp
[...]

<milestone type="line"/> was intended for this purpose.

There's also <milestone type="halfLine"/>, which is useful for early 
Germanic, Indic, and maybe other mss.
[...]

Rendered verse numbers go in the n attribute of the <verse> element, and 
that permits whatever characters you could want. (The osisID also 
permits latin letters.)
[...]

--Chris