Capital letters

At the Estoria de Espanna project, we want to mark up the transcription in such a way that the computer knows as closely as possible exactly how the text appears in the images of the folios. This includes details about capital letters.

Capital letters the same size as the rest of the text

When we see capital letters in the text which are the same size as the other letters in the text, and is not illuminated or made to look special in any way, such as the ones in the image below, we simply type a capital letter in the transcription.

In this example you can see the use of an abbreviation expansion tag, which we will cover later. At the moment we are just interested in how to deal with capital letters.

Both of the examples above have a small symbol right before the capital letter at the start of the sentence. This is a paragraph marker. In English it is called a pilcrow. We tell the computer that it is in the folio simply by adding in the pilcrow symbol, ¶.

It is important to ensure you only type a capital letter where you are sure you see one. If a proper noun that would be capitalised in modern Spanish is not capitalised in the folio we do not type a capital letter in the transcription.

Illuminated, special or larger capital letters

We use a simple tag to mark capital letters which are illuminated, larger or otherwise made to look special. This tag tells us which letter appears and its height in lines.

Have a look at this example:

The first letter here is a capital A which is 3 lines high. Here is a snapshot of the transcription for this letter:

 The tag is <hi rend="initX">___</hi>.

There are two parts to this tag that the transcriber has to edit in order to use it accurately. First, where the X is in the tag above, you have to say how many lines high the capital letter is. Secondly, where the gap is between > and < you have to write which capital letter it is.

Have a look at a few more examples and their tags:

1. 

2. 

3.