TEI Publisher and eXist-db v3.0 release

Dear list,

It is our great pleasure to announce the public stable release of eXist-db
<http://www.exist-db.org> v3.0 and perhaps of even more interest for the
TEI community an accompanying release of the TEI Publisher
<http://teipublisher.com/index.html>.

TEI Publisher is an open source app for eXist-db which allows you to
instantly publish a digital edition without writing any code. Publishing
any TEI content requires only few simple steps:

   -

   Upload the content into eXist
   -

   Customize the appearance via TEI ODD file
   -

   Generate a robust standalone application


Apps generated with TEI Publisher work well across devices and include
features like page by page browsing, search and cross-media export or
side-by-side text and image display (quick demo
<http://showcases.exist-db.org/exist/apps/shakespeare-pm/works/F-ham.xml?odd=shakespeare.odd>).


This approach has been applied to a range of commercial and academic
projects, and has proven very successful in terms of development time,
maintenance cost, performance and scalability, an outstanding example being
the Foreign Relations of the United States <https://history.state.gov/>
series at the US Department of State.

TEI Publisher builds upon an efficient implementation of the TEI Processing
Model, so customising the appearance of the text is done in TEI XML. No
media specific stylesheets are required since rendition choices are
transparently translated into different media types like HTML, XSL-FO,
LaTeX, or ePUB.

TEI Publisher empowers the editors, offering rapid publishing across media
while assuring full control over editorial decisions.

For developers, TEI Publisher heavily reduces the amount of custom code
required by typical digital edition. Transformations can be customized just
by tweaking a single processing specification expressed in TEI ODD and
changes are consistently carried through into all output formats. Highly
formulaic and easily readable TEI ODD processing models save thousands of
lines of handwritten transformations. Typically less than a few hundred
lines of ODD instructions are sufficient to cover the needs even for
projects of broad scope and volume, sustaining substantial everyday
traffic. This means roughly ten-fold decrease in code size alone, not
mentioning drastic improvements in maintenance.

We hope you will find this both interesting and useful and encourage you to
visit the project website <http://teipublisher.com> and try it out together
with new eXist-db release. Meanwhile, since many of you here on the list
might have already heard something about TEI Publisher we would like to use
this opportunity to answer some frequently asked questions:

   -

   TEI Publisher is a free software released under GPLv3 licence.
   -

   It has been so far developed with support from eXist Solutions but we
   welcome and strongly encourage other contributions, both via community
   engagement and pull requests as well as financial support and other forms
   of cooperation.
   -

   TEI Publisher implements at its heart the TEI Processing model which has
   become a standard part of TEI Consortium’s recommendations. The processing
   model library can be used independently of the TEI Publisher app.
   -

   TEI Publisher is a result of serendipitous chain of events started with
   the TEI Simple project but by no means are TEI Publisher’s applications
   limited to documents encoded in TEI Simple schema. TEI Publisher can be
   made to work with any XML vocabulary as long as default processing models
   are created for it.
   -

   TEI Publisher requires eXist-db v3.0 (see below) and can be installed
   from the Dashboard via Package Manager.


Outlook

Ideas for future developments include:

   -

   We would like to offer preconfigured app templates to cover specific TEI
   use cases like EpiDoc, epistolary corpora or manuscripts, as well as
   support for different layouts (e.g. facsimile display). We are looking for
   your suggestions and contributions in this area.
   -

   More output options: we would welcome some TeX specialists to improve
   the current LaTeX output mode. There are also concrete plans concerning an
   interface to indesign.
   -

   A visual editor for ODD to facilitate creation of processing model
   instructions.
   -

   Extend the tei processing model library to transform other XML languages
   than TEI


eXist-db v3.0

eXist-db is a popular choice in TEI community and many of you have already
used Release Candidate or development builds over previous stable release.
Now that v3.0 is out we encourage everyone to upgrade to this new stable
release which is the culmination of almost 1,500 changes made in the last
two years bringing numerous new features and improvements. During this time
eXist-db went through extensive stress testing demonstrating substantial
performance gains confirmed in production settings, including numerous
digital humanities project.

Full release notes can be found here
<http://exist-db.org/exist/apps/wiki/blogs/eXist/eXist-db-v3>, but we’d
like to highlight the support for XQuery v3.1, including the array and map
data types, serialization and JSON parsing, new facilities for the Lucene
full text index, new yajsw service wrapper and Jetty version, significant
performance boosts in full text and range indexes, sped up type checks and
improved optimizations for path expressions, not to mention fixes for a
number of mission critical bugs. Happy eXisteering!


Best regards,

Magdalena Turska

Wolfgang Meier