Character or characters on the source document having suffered some kind of damage which does not necessarily impede its interpretation or legibility.

• TEI definition: damage ; EpiDoc-specific customization: damage

Characters damaged on the source document, but not sufficiently ambiguous to require tagging as unclear may if desired be tagged with the damage element.

There is not strictly any Leiden equivalent to the category of damaged but perfectly legible characters. Although some scholars have used the underdot indiscriminately for damaged characters whether they are legible or ambiguous outside of their context, this is not generally recommended in epigraphic or papyrological practice. Encoding damaged characters distinctly is therefore an optional feature, not core to the Leiden distinctions that EpiDoc aims to reflect, and may be adopted at the discretion of individual projects. There is currently no recommended rendering for this feature, and it is not handled in the EpiDoc Example Stylesheets.

One reason for tagging damaged characters explicitly might be to enable the linking of parts of the support to images (as encoded in the facsimile element) using a facs attribute.

Further, a larger span of damage that includes both legible and illegible characters and even lacunae might be contained in a single damage element, which would then include unclear, supplied and other tags within it.