TEI Publisher 5.0.0

Wolfgang Meier

This is major release building on the faceting feature added in eXist-db 5.0.0 RC8 and introducing Word document import and draft coverage of DTS API.

Release Highlights: Facets

Facets allow users to quickly navigate through a result set by selecting from the list of predefined categories. This way, users can drill down into the set, reducing the number of displayed items with every step. As the user chooses a facet, the set necessarily becomes smaller, so non-matching entries will disappear from sight.

Facets are a new feature in eXist 5.0.0. They are super fast because eXist will create them when indexing the document. No extra computation is needed when the user clicks on a facet to drill down into a displayed set: all information is already available in the index. By default TEI Publisher configures two facets: Genre and Language while Van Gogh demo presents a more elaborate example of facets in action.

Van Gogh demo

The Van Gogh edition is often considered a model example for correspondence. Following the recent release of XML sources for all the letters we've decided to use this excellent resource to showcase the new faceting feature of eXist 5.0.0 as well as the dynamic, user configurable, multi column display of the original Van Gogh website using the webcomponents provided by TEI Publisher in a playful styling.

DOCX import

New docx module based on custom ODD for docx to TEI transformation is available to allow for importing documents in docx format, preserving their textual content, structure and basic semantics of the text. Due to the particularities of docx, reconstructing logical document structure can be only based on certain heuristics but TEI Publisher preserves basic document divisions and headings, lists, tables, embedded images, foot- and endnotes, as well as recognizing styles whose names start with tei: as TEI elements with the same name, e.g Johann Wolfgang Goethe styled with tei:persName style will be converted to <persName>Johann Wolfgang Goethe</persName>.

DTS API

TEI Publisher now implements a Distributed Text Services client and exposes core endpoints of DTS API. Custom <dts-client> component allows for browsing remote DTS server collections and documents which are rendered via TEI Publisher's ODD.

Main New Features and Bug Fixes

  • Facets based document filtering

  • DOCX (Word) document format import

  • Draft implementation of the DTS API

  • New pb-toggle-feature UI component for switching between two states of a parameter passed to ODD, e.g. normalized and diplomatic view

  • Coverage for embedding TEI Publisher output components in other websites (e.g. WordPress)

  • Remove dependency on monex and calls to deprecated map functions

  • i18n: Performance improvements, support for multiple catalogue files for a single language, Dutch translation

  • Fix DocBook support for generated apps

  • Simplify login configuration

  • Use new field definitions for metadata in index config

  • Support page breaks in non-TEI vocabularies

Get It!

TEI Publisher 5.0.0 is available as an application package on top of the eXist XML Database. Install it into a recent eXist (5.0.0 RC8 or newer) by going to the dashboard and selecting TEI Publisher from the package manager.

For more information refer to the documentation or visit the homepage to play around with it.

Thanks

Our thanks go to Office of the Historian of the United States Department of State for funding a large part of work on the faceting feature for eXist-db.

We are also grateful to the Van Gogh Museum & Huygens ING for releasing XML source files of Vincent Van Gogh letters under an open licence which allowed us to use this data as our demo samples. Same goes for EEBO-TCP and Bodleian First Folio, already protagonists of TEI Publisher demos for a longer time.