Important part of work on the TEI Publisher is to test it on new examples and often such tests manifest certain shortcomings or bring ideas for missing functionality. Recent release of the XML sources of Van Gogh Letters under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence gave us an excellent opportunity to try and reconstruct a complete edition – by many regarded as a model digital edition of correspondence – in the newest version of the TEI Publisher.

The TEI Publisher version sports dynamic view panels for different perspectives on the letter - transcription, translation, facsimile and commentaries. It aims to resemble closely the rendering from the original website though it was not the point of the exercise to mimic it exactly and in few cases we decided on alternative rendering. Worth noting is the addition of the faceted search – an upcoming feature in eXist-db 5.0.0 – for which this app was a development test case.

We hope that the TEI Publisher / Van Gogh demo will give the opportunity to show at a glance main new and old features of the TEI Publisher and point out some of the challenges it tries to address as a general purpose publishing platform.

PS Please note that the TEI Publisher edition of Van Gogh letters is just a demo showcasing eXist-db and TEI Publisher and does not intend to compete with or supplement the canonical version in any way.