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

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.

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).

Important: whereas in cases in which the number of characters lost is known to the editor, quantity is used, in the case of an unknown number of characters being lost we use extent:

• extent with a value of "unknown" denotes the fact that it is not possible to determine how many characters have been lost.

gap should also take the following attributes:

• reason explains why the text has been restored, and for a lacuna is usually given the value "lost" (although other values are possible).
• 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.).

Panciera 1991 8.3; SEG: [---]

Sosin 2011: [- ca. ? -]