Common Bibliographical / Structural Features

Each line of prose within a heading or paragraph must be marked explicitly with the self-closing line-beginning ( lb) element. Only mark line beginnings within prose (i.e. a paragraph, heading, note, et cetera); new lines between structural elements like paragraphs and headings do not need to be encoded and lines within poems should be encoded according to the documentation on Poetry.

Since we are primarily concerned with the intellectual content of the manuscript, our encoding does not attempt to replicate the exactly layout of the page. Instead, pages are represented by the self-closing pb element, which does not contain any content itself, but marks the beginning of a new page.

The pb element requires the facs attribute to point to the page that it represents. To point to the page, use the special

pg

prefix, followed by a colon, and the "collection" page number (see Encoding Facsimiles for documentation on the different kind of page numbers):

Bibliographic features that precede and following page beginnings (catchwords and page numbers) should be encoded using the fw element. Use the type attribute on to classify the formework (

pageNum

for a page number,

catchword

for a catchword) and the place attribute to describe where it is on the page:

Formeworks and page beginnings can appear anywhere in the document, including within paragraphs, et cetera. When a paragraph is split between pages, do not create a new paragraph, but simply encode the formework and page beginning where it happens:

If the item you're encoding does not start at the beginning of the page (i.e. it begins in the middle of the page), you do not need to have an initial pb element.

End of line hyphens require special encoding to signal that a) the hyphen is incidental and b) that the word the hyphens splits should be reconsituted when indexed by search engines, etc.

In all cases, the first step is to tag the hyphen using the pc element with an force value of weak, which means that this is a punctuation character that does not break the word.

When a word is split across a line, surround the entire word, including the pc and the lb, with the w tag:

Words split across a page beginning require more complex encoding, since we must avoid claiming that formeworks are part of the hyphenated word. When a word is split across a page boundary, each part of the word should be enclosed in a w element that also contains a part attribute; this part attribute should have a value of "I" for the initial part of the word and "F" for the final part of the word. For example:

Horizontal rules are lines written in the document that delimit structures and signal some sort of structural shift. These are distinct from underlines and borders and should only be used in cases where the primary function of the line is organizational and not semantic.

To encode these, we use the custom rule element:

The unit attribute is mandatory and must be one of either "section" (for all horizontal rules that mark changes in sections) or "item".

Use

unit="section"

when the line separates parts of an item; e.g. the line between a postscript and a signature, et cetera. These should always be between the two structural elements that the line delimits; e.g.:

Encode the line that separates two items (i.e. the final horizontal line at the end of one item) using the

unit="item"

at after the end body tag; these lines should only be encoded for the item that it ends.