Dear Dominik,
We used question marks to indicate unclear when we were not able to read the character, or we used the unclear element
We used a gap element when the ms. was damaged
We encountered empty headbars which I believe indicated that the scribe could not read his exemplar.
Take a look at https://www.sanskritlibrary.org/catindex.html, UPenn item 2623, f15r and f15v.  We write "writes an empty headbar where his model must have failed to insert syllables in red where space had been left for them.”   Here we supplied the missing text in angle brackets [indicating we as editors made the insertion].  See our description of the final rubrics in both works 1 and 2.

Yours,
Peter

p.s. But more likely the scribe just left the blank spaces to fill in later with red ink but never got around to doing it.

******************************
Peter M. Scharf, President
The Sanskrit Library
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On 15 Jul 2021, at 7:19 PM, Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear colleagues,

There's a TEI discussion about a new element <ellipsis> to be added to the next edition of the TEI guidelines.  The idea is that this tag would mark,

"the purposeful indication in the source document that a passage has been omitted."
or
"when the source explicitly indicates `there is stuff missing here'."

An example that has been shared is the poem in the middle of the central column of this page, where there's a line of asterisks.  They would be tagged

<ellipsis>*  *  * *</ellipsis>

We're looking for more examples.  If you can quickly (before mid-August) lay your hand on a good, clear example from a Sanskrit text, I would be grateful to know about it.

For example, MSS in which the scribe writes a little series of mātrā lines showing that he can't read those akṣaras in his exemplar at that point.  I think that would count as ellipsis in the sense given above

Best,
Dominik
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