Creating Hymnals in ThML

ThML is an XML dialect primarily intended for theological or biblical texts, with support for bibliographic information (like TEI). It includes support for hymns; so a hymnal with ThML markup can be installed automatically at both the Hymnary and CCEL.

This is not the official ThML documentation.

Hymnal Bibliographical Information

Every ThML book begins with a <ThML.head> block
including these records:

• <title> -- the name of the book
• <generalInfo>
• <PrintSourceInfo>
• <electronicEdInfo>
• <style> -- optional CSS stylesheet

Hymnal Front Matter

The <ThML.body> section may contain table of contents, preface, and other material just as any other book. There is one recommended section, a <div> (or <divn>) with an attribute, id="cover", which
is used by the Hymnary as the title page of the hymnal.

Hymn Header

Hymn Text

The <verse> (hymn stanza) and <l> (line) tags mark up the text of the hymn itself:

• <verse>
• <l>First line of stanza</l>
• <l>Second line of stanza</l>
• <l>Third line of stanza</l>
• <l>Fourth line of stanza</l>
• </verse>

Indentation of individual lines is shown by the class attribute: class="t" for one "em" (or two spaces in a monospaced font), "t2" for 2 ems; classes "t3" through "t10" are also defined.

Reviewing Hymnals using a CSS-aware Browser

Firefox will render HTML using XML tags, provided sufficient information is given in its CSS stylesheet. Since both CCEL and the Hymnary use their own transformations, their presentation will not be identical, but this approach allows effective proofing of a ThML text.