After weeks of making, unmaking, applying, erasing, reapplying organization schemes, I had to face the music and settle for TEI that would give me the necessary information and help me prepare texts for further transformation.

Getting help from MCK (UVA-TEI-whiz and all-around marvel) both cemented some loose notions I had had about TEI and gave me the necessary channeling to make sure I was on the right track.

Basically each letter will need a metadata head, marked salutation, paragraph markers and closing markers. Internally, I’m aiming to start with marking dates and people, but I’m hoping to find a python program that will do that for me….

Here’s what I’ve cooked up so far: I bolded what you would type, but you’ll also see fillers for the parts that you would change. You don’t need spaces between the carats and the words they’re marking.