Fri Aug 15 2025

New Release of the TEI Guidelines 4.10.0 / Stylesheets 7.59.0

On 15 August 2025, The TEI Consortium released version 4.10.0 of the TEI Guidelines, codenamed “The Olinguito Release” celebrating the discovery of the olinguito in South America which was announced by the Smithsonian Institution on this date in 2013. This release includes version 7.59.0 of the TEI Stylesheets.

Helena Bermúdez Sabel, Elli Bleeker, and Patricia O’Connor were our release technicians, and the release process was helped along by our ever-vigilant Council members and friends, with special thanks to Syd Bauman, Hugh Cayless, Martin Holmes, and Peter Stadler. For details about what has changed in the new version, please see the release notes below.

You will find the new release of the TEI Stylesheets, made in conjunction with the 4.10.0 release, at https://github.com/TEIC/Stylesheets/releases/tag/v7.59.0. The Debian package has been updated at http://packages.tei-c.org/deb/, and the TEI Guidelines and the Stylesheets are available for download at https://sourceforge.net/projects/tei/files/.

The oXygen TEI plugin has been updated with the latest version as well. A description on “How to automatically update your TEI framework in oXygen” can be found at https://github.com/TEIC/oxygen-tei/blob/master/oxygen-tei-plugin.md.

TEI P5 version 4.10.0 and Stylesheets version 7.59.0 release notes

Release 4.10.0 is codenamed ‘The Olinguito Release’.

This release introduces new features and resolves a number of issues raised by the TEI community. The majority of these changes and corrections are a consequence of feature requests or bugs reported by the TEI community using the GitHub tracking system. A full list of the issues resolved in the course of this release cycle may be found under the 4.10.0 milestone. Many thanks to the community contributors who reported issues, sent bug fixes, and helped with the drafting that led to this release, including: GitHub user a1ix2, John Bampton, Piotr Bański, Lou Burnard, Hugh Cayless, Ash Clark, Tomaž Erjavec, David Maus, Natsuko Nakagawa, Matija Ogrin, Klaus Rettinghaus, and GitHub user rvdb.

The following changes are particularly worth highlighting in this release:

Changes to content models

Changes to the build process for publishing the Guidelines

  • With this release, the Guidelines are no longer served in the outdated and proprietary Kindle .mobi format, since they can be read in the EPUB format in the Kindle application (#2574 and PR #2600).
  • We have updated the Guidelines build process to apply SchXslt, which implements Schematron validation with XSLT (PR #2509).

ODD-breaking change and deprecation

The following change introduced with this release could invalidate ODD customizations in TEI projects. Those maintaining ODD customizations of the TEI should be aware of the following change, and may need to adapt their ODD files accordingly.

  • Writers of Schematron in ODD customizations will find that Schematron assert and report tests must be established within a rule with a context attribute. A missing context was previously deprecated with a warning, but now generates an error (PR #2680).

Improvements of prose and examples

  • The Dedication and the Preface and Acknowledgments have been significantly revised with this release. The dedication now includes our founding editor of the TEI consortium and Guidelines, C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen (1954-2024), and provides ‘about’ links for each person listed. The Preface and Acknowledgments are now updated for the first time since the launch of P5 in 2007, and they now list TEI Board members who have served over the past two decades (#2741, #2284, #2688, and PR #2743).
  • This release provides a revision and a new example of dictionary encoding adapted from the TEI Lex-0 specification (#2718 and PR #2746).
  • An example in Core Tags for Drama has been revised to replace p with ab as better suited to encode a passage without asserting whether the passage is either prose or verse (#2719 and PR #2731).
  • XPath examples were corrected in Chapter 3 (#2690).
  • This release revises an existing dictionary example to help clarify the difference between ed and edRef (#2653 and PR #2730).
  • The definition of ident on remarks has been modified from teidata.text to teidata.name and its description had been revised (#2681 and PR #2682).
  • Many element specifications have been revised to list reference locations indicating where they are mentioned in the Guidelines (#2652 and PR #2722).
  • German translations have been added to glosses and descriptions of global attributes (PR #2674).
  • Attribute descriptions in multiple languages have been harmonised for consistency (#2663 and PR #2695).

Documentation

  • Improvements to TEI Council Working Papers (TCW) 22 and 31 (Documentation PR #18 and PR #19).

Housekeeping

  • The encoding of list elements in the Guidelines has been revised to apply the rend attribute consistently for ordered lists (#2683 and PR #2693).
  • Broken links have been repaired (PR #2673 and PR #2679).
  • Improvements in the JavaScript handling of pop-up notes (PR #2692).

TEI Stylesheets

In addition, many improvements have been made to the XSLT stylesheets (which provide processing of TEI ODD files for Roma and TEIGarage as well as other TEI conversions). The Stylesheets are maintained separately from the Guidelines at https://github.com/TEIC/Stylesheets. A full list of the issues resolved in the course of this release cycle may be found under the 7.59.0 milestone.

Highlights of this release follow.

  • Repairs to teitohtml.xsl to ensure the type of ab is output as the value of an HTML class (Stylesheets 723 and PR #724).
  • The transformtei bin file can now process filenames with spaces (Stylesheets PR #738).
  • Improved processing of Schematron in ODD processing (Stylesheets PR #731, #749, #750, PR #751, and PR #762).
  • Repairs of broken links pointing to information about deprecation warnings (Stylesheets #694 and PR #747).
  • Improvements in the Stylesheets test suite (Stylesheets #728, #755, and PR #756).
  • Emendations of broken links in the Stylesheets README (Stylesheets #703 and PR #710)
  • Modification of odd.css to modify the styling of new attribute lists in HTML ODD documentation (Stylesheets #657 and PR #682).