General Guidelines For All Textual Data

Tibetan Renaissance Seminar > Technical Documentation > General Guidelines For All Textual Data

General Guidelines For All Textual Data from the Tibetan Renaissance Seminar

These are general principles the apply to all textual data enter for THDL work.

Use ONLY Unicode fonts whether Roman script with or without diacritics, Chinese characters, Tibetan script, or another script. Unicode is the world standard for how to encode the world's scripts. See:

  1. Fonts & Related Issues
  2. Tibetan Script, Fonts, & Related Issues

For Tibetan, use the external link: THDL Extended Wylie Scheme for rendering the Tibetan in Roman Script with proper spelling (blo bzang grags pa), and use the external link: THDL Simplified Phonetic Scheme for rendering in easy to pronounce form (Losang Drakpa). For those of you who know Tibetan, it will take a bit of time to figure out the latter - do it. For those of you who don't know Tibetan, I just ask you to be consistent and use one or the other.

If you know Tibetan, and you are producing lists of Tibetan terms for any reason, you must produce the phonetic version.

In text-dense materials - essays, paragraph summaries, etc. - Tibetan names should be given phonetically, and on the first occurrence the Wylie version should be given parenethically, followed by a comma with the birth dates and death dates. Thus [Tashi Lhundrub] (bkra shes lhun grub, 1234-1289).

For reference in text materials to place names, personal names, text titles, etc. refer the name to the corresponding WIKI page if there is one. Just get the page's global name, and use the markup [John Doe | globalname]. You should also verify the word occurs in one of the relevant glossaries with the proper spelling - place names, personal names, text titles, or terms

  1. Book titles: the main thing is to add a bibliographical reference if the book is now extant. Non-Tibetan students are exempted from this requirement. If you know the import of the book from secondary sources, then put a note on the relevance of the book in the description column. For the resources and description, see Book titles Cited in the Blue Annals.
  1. Place Names: the main thing is to add a feature type to the place. The feature type should be drawn from the THDL Feature Thesaurus, which thus also needs to be modified as relevant. If you know the import of the place from secondary sources, then put a note on the relevance of the place in the description column. For the resources and description, see Place Names Cited in the Blue Annals.
  1. Personal Names: people, deities, etc. the main thing is to add a reference if the personal name is now extant. Specify as possible type of person, ethnicity, sect, and birth/death dates. If you know the import of the person from secondary sources or the context, then put a note on the relevance of the book in the description column. For the resources and description, see Person Names Cited in the Blue Annals.
  1. Organizations: clans, families, sects, other. There are two WIKI pages but they are unfinished. On the principles articulated above, create a WIKI page structure to hold these. See Reference Resources for The Blue Annals for WIKI pages to create.