Your first transcription

This tutorial produces a small but complete transcription. It takes a few minutes and touches most of the workflow: a template, the shorthand, a page break, an abbreviation, lemmatization, saving and export.

1. Choose a template

Start Saga-Scribe and choose Menota in the toolbar’s template menu. A template supplies the TEI header and the closing markup, and decides how words are encoded. The Menota template enables the three MENOTA transcription levels and word wrapping.

If you only want plain TEI P5, choose TEI P5 instead. The built-in TEI P5 template does not wrap words, so lemmatization and annotations are unavailable there unless you duplicate it with Word wrapping enabled.

2. Type a transcription

Type the following into the editor. It is a short extract in Old Norse, with a page break, line breaks, an abbreviation, an unclear reading and a gap:

///1r //1 Hér hefr upp sǫgu .abbr[kgs]{konungs} ?{Haralds}? ins hár~//2fagra
[...3<ok>] -{hans}- +{sona}+ .p Þat er upphaf várs máls.

Wait for the preview to update. In the Text view you should see the reading text, with the page number and line numbers. Switch to XML to see the structure the shorthand produced.

What the markers mean:

Marker	Meaning
///1r	Page break, folio 1 recto
//1, //2	Line breaks, numbered
.abbr[kgs]{konungs}	Abbreviation kgs, expanded to konungs
?{Haralds}?	Unclear reading
hár~//2fagra	One word continued across a line break
[...3<ok>]	A gap of about three characters, with ok supplied
-{hans}-	Deletion
+{sona}+	Addition
.p	New paragraph, on its own between spaces

Tip

If a marker is not recognised, the editor underlines it in red and the preview reports the error with a line and column. Nothing is exported while errors remain.

3. Lemmatize a word

Click sǫgu in the Text preview. The word panel opens on the Lemmatize tab.

1. Known analyses may already contain an analysis for this form. If not, search the ONP dictionary for a headword, or enter the analysis by hand.
2. Choose the word class and the morphological categories that apply. For sǫgu, a plausible analysis is xNC cA nS gF (common noun, accusative singular feminine).
3. The Normalized form starts from the word’s current form. Change it if your normalization differs.
4. Click Save.

The word is now marked in the preview as lemmatized. In the XML view it carries lemma and me:msa attributes.

4. Add an annotation

With the word panel open, switch to the Annotate tab. Add a Note, a Semantic category or a Paleographic observation. A note is written as a <note> after the word; the other two are written into the word’s ana attribute.

To annotate several words, hold Shift and click another word to extend the span.

5. Save the project

Save with Ctrl+S (Cmd+S on macOS). The first save asks for a location. Choose a name, for example fragment.teis.

A project file is a ZIP archive holding the shorthand, the compiled XML, lemmas, annotations and metadata together. Opening it later restores the whole session.

6. Export

Open the Export menu in the toolbar:

• TEI-XML writes the complete document, including the header and the MENOTA levels.
• HTML transforms the document with the stylesheet chosen in Settings and embeds its styles and the Junicode font, so the file works on its own.
• PDF lays out the same output on A4 pages with margins and page numbers.

Exports are refused while the shorthand contains errors.

Where to go next

• Read the shorthand overview and then the pages on line and page breaks and editorial marks.
• Learn about lemmatization and the MENOTA analysis codes.
• If you already have a TEI edition, read Importing existing files before editing it.