Robert Shimmin <shimmin@uiuc.edu> wrote:

Joshua Hutchinson wrote:

...

Give me a little better explanation of red-ink (and maybe a link to an example so that I can see what you mean too) and I'll try to see if we have anything currently that would work.

Not much to explain. Historically, printers used red ink to highlight important things. The most famous example being that in many editions of the Gospels, words spoken by Christ are printed in red. Mostly, I'm just asking for control over font color.

I asked for red in particular because if there are philosophical or technical reasons why the markup should not allow arbitrary control of font color, it would at least be nice to be able to use red.

-- RS

I think you have answered your own question here. TEI is designed to not presume or dictate any particular presentation, with perhaps the exception of distinquishing between block and inline elements. If text is rendered in red text in the original, and you believe that indicates highlighting but you don't know why, use the <hi> element. If you want to document that the original highlighting was in red (without suggesting that it ought to ultimately be rendered in a red font) you can use <hi type="redtext">. If you want to suggest that the text ought to be rendered in a red font you can include a style sheet with the selector "hi[type~=redtext] { color: red }." If you want to be specific that you want the text to be rendered in red, without indicating that it was red in the original you could even use <hi rend="red">. TEI does not have any controlled vocabulary for the 'rend' attribute (although a number of commonly used values are emerging) so as long as your style sheet knows what "rend='red'" means, you ought to be OK. On the other hand, if you know why the text is being highlighted (i.e. it is the words of Jesus) you can use a more specific markup such as <sp who="Jesus">. Again, if you want Jesus' words rendered in red, use a style declaration such as "sp[who=Jesus] { color:red }". Despite TEI's acceptance of the 'rend' attribute, if you want to suggest how the document should be rendered you really should use fairly specific and unambiguous markup combined with Cascading Style Sheets or XSL transformations.