Using ODD for Multi-purpose TEI Documentation

The philosophy of "literate programming" (Knuth 1984), on which the TEI ODD is founded, proposes that code and documentation be written and maintained as a single integrated resource, from which both working programs and readable documentation can be generated. As currently designed, the TEI ODD system supports these goals, and there exist several good examples of extended project documentation written using the ODD customization file (see (Trolard 2009), (Burnard and Sperberg-McQueen 2006), (Burnard et al. 2010) and also the TEI Guidelines themselves). However, at present these examples only assume and demonstrate the ability to generate two types of documentation: a prose narrative and a set of reference documentation. As text encoding projects develop and mature they generate a variety of documentation that may include training tutorials and reference documentation, public documentation of editorial and encoding practices, documentation of their TEI customization, and internal documentation of the encoding decisions that have resulted in their current encoding rationale. Many of these other forms of output (such as training tutorials) have not been tried in practice and the current ODD processor, Roma, does not explicitly support them. In this paper we explore the possibility of generating more complex and varied forms of documentation using the TEI ODD customization file.