This document introduces and documents the content and use of the schemas provided by the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, as part of the TEI P5 distribution, for the use of authors who want to submit their articles to the journal in TEI. The schema described in this document is highly constrained and restrictive, consisting only of some 80 elements, compared with the complete TEI schema which contains nearly six hundred. In addition to general structural constraints, the ODD file also embeds fine-grained Schematron rules, severely limiting your options as you encode your file.
It is very likely that, as an experienced and confident TEI encoder with a broad knowledge of the TEI schema, you will find this at least a little frustrating. Where the TEI typically provides several ways of encoding the same phenomenon, we usually support only one. Where larger TEI schemas will allow you to describe rendering features (<hi rend="italic">) we do not allow that; we force you to choose a conceptual tag such as emph or <title level="j">.
The reasons for this are fairly obvious. From the XML document you submit, we need to generate a range of different outputs—ODT for reviewers and copyeditors to read and annotate, and OpenEdition XML for submission to the revues.org publication engine that supports the journal website. We must enforce a degree of conformity across all submissions, not only in order to maintain consistency when we publish, but also to ensure that contributions are assessed by reviewers in as fair a manner as possible, without possible influences due to divergence from the expected style rules or formatting conventions.
However, this constraint and conformity has advantages for you too, as an author. Our schemas will enforce a number of constraints which, we believe, may assist you in improving the quality of your article; these are a few of them:
In what follows, we aim to provide a readable guide to encoding your article (or perhaps even composing it) according to the journal schemas, beginning with the template we provide, and viewing your results as you work through the use of CSS (in Author Mode in Oxygen) or by transforming it into ODT for examination in your word-processor.
This document is a work-in-progress (always), and we welcome your feedback at either mholmes@uvic.ca (Martin Holmes) or ron.vandenbranden@kantl.be (Ron Van den Branden).