The Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative, which employ SGML, are an exceptionally useful tool for anyone encoding literary texts. SGML-encoded RET texts, for example, always have a TEI header and adopt many TEI entities and elements. Encoding is governed by the need for economy, readability, accuracy, and faithfulness to the conventions of writing in the Renaissance. Each electronic transcription generally follows only one physical copy of a book or manuscripts. Apparent errors are left as is, with suggested emendations being made wthin tags or ignore-brackets.
All texts employ one character-encoding scheme and a common set of reference tags.
Without this kind of uniformity, the library of texts could not be analyzed as a single corpus. Different characters in the text normally have their own unique representation in the electronic transcription. Otherwise, editions retain the spelling, capitalization, brevigraphs, special characters, and font of the original. Abbreviations are all tagged as such and are not expanded, except within tags or ignore-brackets. Damaged, interlineated, and canceled text is all tagged as such.