TEI: P5 Guidelines

P5, the current version of the TEI Guidelines, was officially released on November 1, 2007. P5 is a major revision of the Guidelines that offers many new and improved features. Although P5 is very different from P4, both in its technical details and in many of its encoding provisions, migration from P4 to P5 will be largely automatable using readily available tools. The TEI provides information and advice on migration, and has also established a page on the TEI wiki where TEI users can contribute migration tools and stylesheets.

You can read the online version of the P5 Guidelines, purchase printed and bound copies from Omnipress, download the PDF version, or download the schemas, source files, documentation etc as zip packages from the TEI SourceForge site; more detailed instructions for accessing and using these materials are also available. The Roma customization tool can help you through the process of creating a customized TEI schema. More detailed information about using Roma is also available.

Major changes in P5

P5 provides important new encoding features, including new support for manuscript description, multimedia and graphics, standoff annotation, and representation of data pertaining to people and places improvements to elements like <sic> and <corr> to provide more powerful methods of encoding textual alternatives changes to the way that linking mechanisms are expressed, so that pointing to other documents will be easier major changes in the handling of languages and character sets

P5 also takes advantage of the power of XML schema languages, so that TEI users can now reference other XML tagsets, such as MathML, from within a TEI document embed TEI text within other types of XML documents, such as METS and MODS records perform more rigorous validation (to ensure, for example, that the value of a @when attribute really is a date) create and maintain user customizations more easily