Dear Council, Martin Mueller sends this request about simplePrint. I wonder which of these options is more sensible. I think I’m persuaded that we should drop it now and replace it with the TEI Publisher ODD, but perhaps we can discuss at the VF2F. Elisa Elisa Beshero-Bondar, PhD (she/they) Chair, TEI Technical Council Program Chair of Digital Media, Arts, and Technology | Professor of Digital Humanities | Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College Typeset by hand on my iPhone Begin forwarded message:
From: Martin Mueller <martinmueller@northwestern.edu> Date: May 15, 2025 at 2:27:11 PM EDT To: Elisa Beshero-Bondar <ebbondar@gmail.com> Subject: please drop simplePrint or correct its embarrassing description.
Dear Elisa,
I have on several occasions complained (without success) about the embarrassing description of TEI simplePrint. My name appears at the top of the current introduction.
The description is oddly condescending and in some instances plain wrong. In retrospect, I think it was a mistake to associate the Processing Model with a particular schema. Since the Processing Model is alive and well in EI Publisher, the best thing would be to drop this particular customization and replace it with TEI Publisher Base
If that can’t be done—and I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t be done—it should at least be possible to correct gross inaccuracies.
In the first of the four summary points, the distinction between print and manuscript is misleading. There are manuscript pages that could be easily encoded with simplePrint, and there are aspects of typography or layout on a printed page that you could not do with this tag set. The relevant criteria are the complexity of the page design and the degree to which you would want to capture its “materiality”.
In the second point, “Early Modern” is defined as “up to the end of the nineteenth century”. The conventional limits of the term are roughly from the 1400’s to 1800. I am not aware of any features that can be encoded in simplePrint but are rarely found in modern materials.
In the third point the reference to “Western European” is plain wrong. As long as the text can be represented in combinations of Unicode, you could use simplePrint as long as the document structure is supported. Homer, the Hebrew Bible, and Anna Karenina are not exactly “Western European” texts.
The condescending tone of the document is most pronounced in the final point, which seems to assume that “specialist research” is measured by the degree of attention to the way in which the text was printed. There are highly specialized forms of inquiry that do not give a hoot about the ways in which pages are laid out and pages are printed as long as the words appear in the right order and in a spelling that makes their meaning apparent.
To conclude with my initial point, the best solution would be to quietly drop simplePrint and replace it with TEI Publisher’s Base ODD. For its first couple of years TEI Publisher followed simplePrint and added its own Base version, which was marginally different. I suggested to Magdalena that TEI Publisher should should drop simplePrint and start with Base. What ever was useful about simplePrint survives in TEI Publisher Base without any of the very dubious rhetoric of simplePrint.
Best
MM
Martin Mueller Professor emeritus of English and Classics Northwestern University