PRINCIPLES OF ORTHOGRAPHY FOR
TEXTS ON MUSIC IN ENGLISH
FROM THE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ERAS (TME)


Principles of orthography for the TME are derived from the principles of orthography followed in the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum and saggi musicali italiani.

I. TEXT

A. Text data files produced from printed or manuscript sources will retain as exactly as possible the original spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. (The fairly large manuscript w will normally be read as lower case, and ff will be read as a capital-letter F.) There will be the following exceptions:

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:

II. MUSICAL NOTATION

All musical symbols or notation that appear within sentences of the text will be entered as codes. In general, single-line examples---especially examples with no specific pitch content---will also be encoded. See the TML's "Table of Codes for Noteshapes and Rests." 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.


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