CME FAQ Sheet #5: $x$ and $d$ Corrections

1. When words have general abbreviation strokes attached to them

   (e.g. dne~, dns~, ihu~, ihm~, cm~, kl~, etc.
   [for domine, dominus, iesu, iesum, capitulum, kalendas])

   do not attempt to represent the abbreviation stroke; instead surround such ordinary letters and entities as the word contains by <ABBR> ... </ABBR> tags:

   <ABBR>dne</ABBR>, <ABBR>ihu</ABBR>

2. Bits that we do not for some reason wish to include in the text should be represented by the empty tag <GAP>.

   This excludes bits that we are already excluding by means of other tags, especially <FIGURE> and <FOREIGN>.

   But it includes individual characters that can be judged from the context to be without definite identity. E.g.,

   "The scribe sometimes adds to his 'd's a squiggle that looks a little like this: ~"

   Render this as:

   "The scribe sometimes adds to his 'd's a squiggle that looks a little like this: <GAP>"

   If it is a single character or object, the plain <GAP> will do. If there are more characters than one involved, use lt;GAP EXTENT="3"gt; (or whatever, where "3" is the number of objects involved).

3. I have added <ABBR> and <GAP> to Vproof.dtd, but not to Vendor.dtd, since the use of these tags involves decisions that I do not wish to trust to the vendors. They will continue to mark unknown characters and diacritics as $x$ and $d$; but we can use the tags at the proofing stage to make sense of the "$"s.

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