Linda E. Patrik wrote


> Three requests:

I'm afraid that for all three you need to tell us a bit more:


> 1) Has anyone had experience doing TEI encoding on Tibetan texts or
another
> foreign language with an odd alphabet, where the text is written in a
script
> software that uses multiple fonts?

I take it we are talking TEI-XML? If so the encoding process itself is
agnostic about "fonts" (so is SGML, but the way the agnosticism appears in
encoding practice is subtly different). In an XML document instance you
record the Unicode codepoints corresponding to the abstract characters you
wish to represent. Fonts are not relevant at this level. You indeed need a
way of telling any processing system that needs to display your text how to
map the abstract characters you have entered to the glyphs a human reader
needs to see, but that's a separate problem (and one that is the subject of
the now nearly ready revised documentation on what used to be called under
P$ a WSD (writing system declaration)). If the software system you refer to
uses Unicode for its internal representation of characters and you are
somehow using that system to generate your input to the encoding process,
then you should have no TEI-specific problems. If however the software is a
self-contained proprietary solution with its own internal non-Unicode method
of internal character representation, you may have a very big problem
indeed. But once you say more, that will be easier to determine.

> 2) Would anyone like a two-week job designing a simple TEI User Interface
for
> a pilot project that used oXygen to TEI encode 50 pages of an English
text?

I think to get useful replies to that you need to say what you mean by "TEI
User Interface" Do you mean a customised template for oXygen that allowed a
rendering-mode  view of specified TEI elements in specified ways?  If so, I
suspect that users of oXygen on this list would be prepared to give you the
pointers you need to do this fairly readily yourself. It should't take
anything like two weeks. But maybe you mean something different?

> 3) Has anyone tried to encode audio files so that they can be linked to
TEI
> encoded texts?

What do you mean by "encode" here re the audio files? Do you mean "record
their binary content in a way that an XML parser can accept , so that they
can be embedded into the same document instance as plain text"? I can't
really see why you would want to do that, but the way to do it would be to
encode the binary values as Base64 pseudo-text. But if you simply mean "I
have some audio that I'd like to play when a reader hits a specific portion
of my text" then this doesn't involve "encoding" the audio itself in any
sense of "encoding" relevant to the TEI, You merely need to use the tagset
designed for synchronisation with audio media. There should be people on the
list with more experience of doing this than I have who could help with some
hints and techniques. But if you don't need actual synchronisation, merely
to say "the audio for this text is in file xxxxx" than that's simply a case
of linking to an unparsed external entity, no different from linking to a
graphics image of a page.

Michael Beddow
.