Humanities primary source texts may take the form of literary works, historical documents, manuscripts, papyri, inscriptions, coins, transcriptions of spoken texts, or dictionaries, and they can be written in any natural language. This information is characterized more than anything by its complexity. It may include variant readings, variant spellings, marginal notes, annotations of various kinds, cancellations, and interlineations, as well as nonstandard characters. Literary texts rarely conform to the simple document structure required by most current text retrieval systems.
Plays consist of acts, scenes, speeches, stage directions, cast lists, and so forth.
There are very many different types of verse. Systems for processing literary texts must also be able to handle different languages and alphabets, both in terms of analyzing the structure of words and displaying the text in the correct script. Most textual information in electronic form is intended to be used in a document retrieval system where a typical user wants to find all the documents about a certain topic. For primary source material in textual form, this is less likely to be the major application. A user may want to locate a quotation, compare the vocabulary of the characters in a novel, examine the rhyme and sound patterns in verse, or even find out whether a particular word is used at all.