• TEI definition: gap ; EpiDoc-specific customization: gap
• TEI definition: name ; EpiDoc-specific customization: name

A gap (gap) indicates a point at which material has been omitted in a transcription, whether for editorial reasons described in the TEI header, as part of sampling practice, or because the material is illegible, invisible, or inaudible.

name indicates a proper noun or noun phrase.

Where characters have been lost on the original support and there is nothing to indicate to the editor how these should be restored, this is marked up as a lacuna using gap. Note that this is usually an empty element, as it marks a point at which the lacuna occurs, and therefore does not contain any content (see sections VIII.7 for examples in which gap can contain other elements).

For a straightforward lacuna whose extent is known, gap should take the following three attributes:

• reason explains why the text has been restored, and for a lacuna is given the value "lost" (other values denote other kinds of non-transcribable text).
• quantity indicates how many characters or lines have been lost (where known).
• unit indicates what kind of textual unit has been lost, such as "character" or "line" (or indeed some other type of textual unit such as "column", "page" etc.).

In cases in which a praenomen has been lost, the quantity of characters missing should be extrapolated (this is usually between 1 and 3 letters). Therefore, in addition to reason and unit, a further two attributes should be used:

• atLeast indicates the minimum number of characters lost.
• atMost indicates the maximum number of characters lost.

gap should also be placed inside name, to denote the fact that the editor considers the lacuna to have contained a name rather than another type of word.

Panciera 1991 8.4: [-]