The TEI Guidelines

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TEI P3 (1999 edition)
TEI P4
TEI P5
TEI Lite

The TEI's Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (TEI P3), first published in April 1994 in two substantial green volumes, remain the TEI's most tangible monument. This print edition is no longer available, although electronic versions of it and earlier editions may be downloaded from the TEI Vault. The rest of this page provides links to current and forthcoming editions.

TEI P3 (1999 edition)

The Text

In May 1999, a revised edition of TEI P3 was produced, correcting several typographic and other errors, and introducing one (1) new element. This (Sperberg-McQueen, C.M.. and Burnard, L. (eds.) (1999). Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. TEI P3 Text Encoding Initiative. Revised reprint: Oxford May 1999) is the currently available edition of TEI P3 (although it is also, rather confusingly, called the `P4beta'). It can be read online here in HTML

A number of other browsable and searchable versions of TEI P3 have been made available elsewhere on the web, notably by the Etext Center at the University of Virginia and the Humanities Text Initiative at the University of Michigan; at the present time (August 2001) these have not been updated to reflect the current version of TEI P3.

You can also download the whole text of TEI P3 in the following formats:

in TEI SGML (P3X format) as a single archive (1 Mb) or using a browsable index.
nicely formatted in PDF as a single file (3.4 Mb) (You will also need an Adobe Acrobat reader)
not quite so nicely formatted in HTML as a single archive (2 Mb); this is the same as the current online edition

The Document Type Declaration

As well as two big green books, and really quite hard to disentangle from them, the TEI produced a modular, extensible, DTD covering most kinds of electronic texts.

You can download this as a single archive (41Kb) or view its browsable index. It is also included with the HTML archive.

TEI P4

In June 2001, the TEI Consortium announced availability of a preliminary version of a major revision of TEI P3, the object of which would be to provide equal support for XML and SGML applications using the TEI scheme. The DTDs for this new edition are available here.

In August 2001, the TEI Consortium announced that the process of revising the text of TEI P3 for ensure XML support was underway, with a view to completing a full draft of the new TEI P4 by the end of the year. You can check the current status of the revision process at this page, which includes links to current drafts of the new edition.

TEI P5

The revisions needed to make TEI P4 have been deliberately restricted to error correction only, with a view to ensuring that documents conforming to TEI P3 will not become illegal when processed with TEI P4. During this process however many possibilities for other, more fundamental, changes have been identified. With the establishment of the new TEI Council, it becomes possible to agree on a programme of work to enhance and modify the Guidelines more fundamentally over the coming years.

TEI P5 will be the next full revision of the Guidelines. No date has yet been fixed for its appearance, but work on it will commence early in 2002.

TEI Lite

To get the best out of the TEI, you need to customize it to suit your requirements. Customization requires some knowledge of the whole of the TEI, if only in order to know what to throw out. TEI Lite is a specific customization designed for the core TEI constituency which has proved very popular; it is documented here. Other customizations may be conveniently built using the Pizza Chef.