TEI Publisher 6.0.0

Wolfgang Meier

This is a major release introducing the refactored and extended TEI Publisher component library as well as numerous bugfixes and new features.

Release Highlight: User Interface Components as an Independent Library

Publisher's library of web components is now distributed via npm. Thanks to the increasing support for the web component standards in modern browsers, the heavier framework used before (Polymer) could be dropped and has been replaced by LitElement, which is just a thin wrapper around native web components. While invisible to users, this redesign greatly improves modularity of Publisher-based applications.

Thanks to npm releases, updating the user interface for all Publisher-based apps becomes simply a question of changing a single variable in the configuration file.

Furthermore, Publisher's library of web components - true to the basic idea of Web Components Standard - can be included in any HTML webpage. This means it can be embedded into existing CMS or any other publishing solution, even if it's not running eXist-db (e.g. the popular Hugo or WordPress). A few lines of HTML is sufficient to embed a document view anywhere you like:

Similarly, if you prefer to write your own application using any of the popular frameworks like angular, vue or react you can easily import the pb-components package and use it directly in your project.

As a final consequence, this change decouples the component library from the TEI Publisher app. It is now possible to host multiple applications, which depend on different versions of the component library, without conflict, within the same eXist-db instance, a point of importance for institutions with numerous projects.

Main New Features and Bug Fixes

  • Redesigned and simplified CSS styling customization

    Styling properties are now exposed via standard CSS files and theme variables. Stylesheets can also be specified within the ODD, as previously, or through pb-view component configuration attributes.

  • Extended internationalization

    • full i18n support for all the labels in HTML templates and within web components

    • mechanism for project specific language files extending the default Publisher collection

    • a number of new languages added and existing ones updated. Currently TEI Publisher is fully translated into Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

  • Subcorpora - new TEI Publisher data organization

    Publisher's pre-populated data collection is now split into Playground and TEI Publisher demo collection areas which illustrate how this mechanism could be used to host multiple subcorpora within single TEI Publisher application.

  • New and improved web components

    • pb-select-feature and pb-toggle-feature components have been extended to allow for interactive changing of display parameters (like switching between regularized or original spelling) which can be then processed client or server-side

    • new API documentation app and web component demo pages

    • pb-mei component for rendering Music Encoding Initiative documents based on Verovio; supports optional MIDI playback using web-midi-player

  • Redesigned ODD editor providing an improved user experience

  • Documentation:

    • reorganized and extended TEI Publisher documentation

    • pb-components API documentation and demos

Get It!

TEI Publisher 6.0.0 is available as an application package on top of the eXist XML Database. Install it into a recent eXist (5.0.0 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.

A 3-part online course on TEI Publisher 6 has been led by Wolfgang Meier in June 2020. Course material, as well as video recordings of all the sessions, and a walk-through for the assignments are available for self-learning. Find all informations on the workshop GitHub page.

Thanks

Our thanks go to the Swiss Nationale Infrastruktur für Editionen - Infrastructure nationale pour les éditions for funding a large part of work on the web component refactoring.

Work on components for toggling has been aided by a small grant from ACE – Austrian Corpora and Editions of the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften.

We are also grateful for the generous contributions of numerous individuals who used the Crowdin platform to translate and proofread Publisher's language files: Boris Lehečka, Øyvind Gjesdal, Sandra Romano Martin, Antonio Rojas Castro, Isabel Marti, Natalia Kotsyba, Elena Spadini, Pietro Liuzzo, Karolina Bielenin-Lenczowska, Jaqueline Pierazzo, Emmanuelle Morlock, Emmanuel Château-Dutier, Clement Plancq, Eduard Drenth, Wout Dillen, Anna-Maria Sichani, Maria Akritidou, Elli Mylonas, Matija Ogrin, Cristina Vertan, Dimitar Illiev, Arman Weidenmann, Leif-Jöran Olsson, Irina Lobzhanidze, Joseph Wicentowski, Juri Leino, Daniel Stoekl, Yael Netzer, Naoki Kokaze, Kiyonori Nagasaki, Toma Tasovac, Alexandra von Criegern, Bettina Pandula, Daria Elagina, and others whom we unfortunately only know by their usernames.

e-editiones

May of 2020 saw an advent of a new scholarly society: e-editiones. Its goal is to promote open standards for digital editions and free software based on them with a focus on TEI Publisher development. All TEI Publisher source repositories have been moved to the e-editiones github.

We encourage you to join the society, through your institution or individually, and take part in our work and discussions, shaping the future of the TEI Publisher.