PRINCIPLES OF ORTHOGRAPHY AND ENCODING FOR
TRAITÉS FRANÇAIS SUR LA MUSIQUE (TFM)

Principles of orthography and encoding for the TFM are adapted from the principles developed for the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum. For details, see the TML "Principles of Orthography" and "Table of Codes for Noteshapes and Rests."

I. TEXT

A. Text data files produced from printed or manuscript sources will retain as exactly as possible the original spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, including misspellings and typographical errors in the original text. There will be the following exceptions:

1. In printed material, small caps will be converted to upper- or lower-case letters as the context requires. (Roman numerals will always be entered as upper-case letters.)
2. In printed material, corrigenda published as a part of the book itself will be entered (but see note B.1.e below). In cases of extensive corrigenda, links will be provided from the original text to the corrected version.
3. Suspensions and abbreviations will be expanded, including those represented as such in modern editions. The French spellings of expansions will be normalized according to the most prevalent orthography in the source. If no example spells the word out in full, modern orthography will be used. Cardinal numbers (Roman or Arabic) will be left as numerals; ordinal numerals will be changed to written text.
4. Periods, commas, or colons will always be placed on the baseline.
5. Proper nouns will be capitalized.
6. Initial letters of titles and true incipits will be capitalized, but initial letters of obvious or apparent fragments will not be capitalized.
7. Single non-Roman letters not part of the standard ASCII character set will be entered as capitalized letter-names between brackets (e.g., letters of the Greek alphabet will be entered as [Gamma], [Delta], etc.). Words written in non-Roman letters will be transliterated according to the standards of the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th ed.
8. Single symbols with no ASCII equivalent will be shown as [signum] (but see below regarding musical notation).
9. In order to preserve the lining of poetry, a return (ASCII code 13) will be entered at the end of each line.
10. Double letters set one above the other will be entered side by side.
11. Similarly, numerical digits normally shown vertically aligned will appear horizontally, separated by a diagonal slash. This includes fractions, ratios, proportions, time signatures, and figured bass numerals.
12. Marginal notes and short footnotes in the original source will be embedded in the text at the appropriate location within single brackets. Footnotes of longer than 2-3 lines will be marked with the appropriate character (a number or symbol), which will be linked to the footnote itself, entered at the end of the file. Each footnote so entered will have a link that will return to the location in the text at which the footnote character appeared. Editorial footnotes will be ignored.

B. Various types of available symbols that are readable on any machine (i.e., from alphanumeric codes 32-126) will be used in data files:

1. Single brackets ([ = ASCII code 91; ] = ASCII code 93), if added editorially rather than occurring as part of the text itself, will enclose various types of material:

(a) Codes showing the beginning of each page or folio side, surrounded by hyphens. For example, [-2-] will indicate the beginning of page 2 in text drawn from a published (or paginated) work; [-f.22v-] will indicate the beginning of the verso of folio 22 in text drawn from a manuscript (or foliated) work. When a single word is split between two pages or folio sides, the break will be indicated after the word.
(b) Codes for musical notation appearing within a sentence (see the section below on musical notation).
(c) Editorial notes indicating the presence of figures, tables, or a musical example. For each example, a separate line will exhibit a reference to the source and the page or folio side (e.g., [Rameau, Observations, 23]). If the example is accompanied by text, this will be included within the brackets (e.g., [Rameau, Observations, 47; text: Exemple. Proportion Harmonique. Proportion Arithmétique. Tierce au dessus.]) to enable the search program to locate and display text strings within figures as well as within the text proper. The text, of course, will also appear in the graphics file (stored and retrievable as a GIF file) that will store the figure, table, or musical example itself.
(d) In the case of manuscript material, text added by later hands, including glosses and scholia (noted following the text: m. sec. or m.alt. or m.rec.), especially by marginal hands (noted following the text: in marg.).
(e) Also for manuscript material, corrections added to the base text (noted: corr.). These may be above the line (noted: sup. lin.) or in the margin (noted: in marg.)
(f) Deletions (noted: del.) and repetitions (noted: bis).
(g) Graphics files, e.g. [Rameau, Observations, 47; text: Exemple. Proportion Harmonique. Proportion Arithmétique. Tierce au dessus.].

2. Angle brackets (< = ASCII code 60; > = ASCII code 62) will enclose (a) letters, words, or passages read by conjecture; or (b) if a short passage cannot be certainly transcribed, dots indicating the approximate number of letters. In the very few cases where an entire passage may be illegible, the number of lines followed by "illisible" will be noted within the angle brackets.

3. Braces ({ = ASCII code 123; } = ASCII code 125) will surround an interpolated passage to show the appropriate transposition.

II. MUSICAL NOTATION

All musical symbols that appear within sentences of the text will be entered as codes, unless reproduced as graphics files. Some frequently used symbols are:

[sqb] for Bécarre
[rob] for Bémol
[x] for Dièse
[sqrt] for Racine carrée
[^] for Exposant.
Single symbols with no ASCII or musical equivalent will be shown as [signum].

Simple musical examples, that is, monophonic excerpts or illustrations without essential explanatory symbols, are encoded according to Barry S. Brook's "The Simplified 'Plaine and Easie Code System' for Notating Music: A Proposal for International Adoption," Fontes Artis Musicae 12 (1965): 156-60. (A description of this system is also available in Barry S. Brook, "The Plaine and Easie Code," in Musicology and the Computer. Musicology 1966-2000: A Practical Progam [Three Symposia], edited by Barry S. Brook [New York: The City University of New York Press, 1970], 53-56.) This useful system of encoding music was designed mainly for indexing purposes and thus pays very little attention to the issue of spaces that may separate the various parameters. In our context of electronic searches, however, spacing is a crucial matter. A search for '4CDEC/CDEC/EF2G (the incipit of "Frère Jacques") would be successful only if the melody had been encoded without any spaces and not as, for example, '4CDEC / CDEC / EF2G. We thus clarify Brook's system to the effect that any spaces and all optional codes will be omitted. If a monophonic example includes text, as is usually the case in vocal excerpts, the text is entered following the codes, separated by a semicolon and a space. Codes and text together appear in brackets and are always preceded by a carriage return (ASCII 13).

Brook's code for cut time (a "C" with a vertical line) does not figure among the basic ASCII character set. This and all other symbols characteristic of mensural notation (relevant in Medieval and Renaissance treatises) will be borrowed from the TML's "Table of Codes of Noteshapes, Rests, Ligatures...," a system of encoding developed by Thomas J. Mathiesen and published in "Transmitting Text and Graphics in Online Databases: The Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum Model," Computing in Musicology 9 (1993-94): 33-48.

Polyphonic or other more complex music examples, charts, figures, graphs, and similar sorts of material that cannot be easily keyed as ASCII text will be scanned, saved in GIF format, and keyed to the original location in the printed or manuscript source.