TEI: 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; see Creating TEI Customizations with Roma for more detailed information on using Roma. (Use the Pizza Chef application to create customized TEI-conformant DTDs for P4 and earlier versions of the Guidelines.)
Write your own customization by hand using the TEI ODD language; see Getting Started with P5 ODDs and Using the TEI (Chapter 23 of the Guidelines) for more detailed information on how to do this.

Customizations provided by the TEI Consortium

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
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.

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

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 (website, prose documentation, ODD files)
EpiDoc: Epigraphic Documents in XML: A P5 customization for encoding epigraphic materials (Guidelines, SourceForge site, ODD)
Digital Archive of Letters in Flanders (DALF): A P4 customization for detailed encoding of letters (Project site and DTD files)
Model Editions Partnership: A P4 customization for encoding editions of historical documents (Project, guidelines, reference manual, DTDs)
TEI with Music Notation: A P5 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.