High level requirements for DE Specs

general principles

• must specifiy standard file encoding and unambiguous conventions for entry of non-ASCII characters
• a convention is needed for DE personnel to indicate and record unknown characters
• character entry conventions must be ergonomic and within capabilities of DE firm
• DE output must be plain text, but will not be well-formed XML
• DE markup should be concise and unambiguous
• DE markup should facilitate conversion to target structured XML document

required structural features

• conventions are needed for standard line, paragraph, and page-level structure
• markup needs to indicate not only where a feature starts, but also where it ends, unless automatic inference of the end location is trivial
• must address headers/footers, notes (marginal, foot- and end-), tables, and lists, and figures
• must support multi-column layouts
• must indicate relation of text to commentary, where these are presented on the page together
• must indicate emphasis (e.g. italics)
• must indicate change of typestyle, where this is semantically significant
• conventions for abbreviations

expository aspects

• conventions should be indicated in numbered sections
• language needs to be kept simple and readable for Chinese employees
• complex structural features should be illustrated with an example (or examples) from actual texts and desired transcription

coverage

• DE is not appropriate where OCR would be more cost-effective
• material needed by the Institute's scientists in the proximate future should be accommodated
• version targets
  • DE Specs 1.0 should cover printed European books up to the nineteenth century
  • DE Specs 1.1 should add support for Chinese books
  • DE Specs 2.0 should cover also transcriptions made by students or other personnel of annotated matter or manuscripts
• out of scope for DE Specs 1.0-2.0
  • specialized document types such as dictionaries
  • dramatic and verse literature
  • complex formal language content (e.g. mathematics, chemical formulae, musical notation)
  • documents such as notebooks, personal letters, and financial documents
  • twentieth-century material (perhaps with certain exceptions)