Keyboard Shortcuts and Special Characters

Rationale

There are a number of actions that you are likely to do and special characters that you are likely to use when encoding your edition. To make encoding easier, we have created a number of keyboard shortcuts that will insert pieces of encoding and special characters into your file. In addition to these project-specific shortcuts, there are some generic shortcuts that are built into Oxygen XML Editor. This documentation will guide you through the practice of using the shortcuts available to you along with how to find special characters that we have not created keyboard shortcuts for.

Oxygenʼs Keyboard Shortcuts

Oxygen has dozens of keyboard shortcuts. Navigate to Options in your Oxygen application and click Menu Shortcut Keys to see them all. Some of the most useful ones are listed below:
Add tags around text: Highlight text you want to tag and press Ctrl+E (Cmd+E on Mac). You will be able to choose an element to put around the text.
Remove tags around text: Put your cursor in an element, and press Ctrl+Alt+X (Cmd+Alt+X on Mac). The tag will disappear, leaving its contents.
Validate your file: Press Ctrl+Shift+V (Cmd+Shift+V on Mac) to validate your file.
Check well-formedness: Press Ctrl+Shift+W (Cmd:Shift+W on Mac) to check well-formedness.
Comment out text: Press Ctrl+Shift+, (Cmd+Shift+M on Mac) machines to turn highlighted text into a comment. This keyboard shortcut will change the encoding of comments nested within the highlighted text so the encoding does not become invalid due to nested comments. To undo the action of turning the highlighted text into a comment, place your cursor anywhere within the comment you have just created and press Ctrl+Shift+comma or Cmd+Shift+M again.

LEMDOʼs Keyboard Shortcuts

We created our LEMDO-specific keyboard shortcuts to help you encode editions within the LEMDO project.

Practice: Bring Up a List of Special Characters

Ctrl+Shift+Space (same command on Mac): This shortcut allows you to bring up a dropdown menu of special characters at any point. Click where you want to insert a character and type Ctrl+Shift+Space. This will generate a list of all special characters that we have added to the lemdo-all.xpr file. This is available to you because you will always have begun your work by opening the lemdo-all.xpr

                              A scrollable list reads: Apostrophe Description: Left Curly apostrophe; Apostrophe Description: Right Curly apostrophe (U+2019); LEMDO: Add Person; LEMDO: Add Pointer; LEMDO: Add Quote; LEMDO: Add a single anchor; LEMDO: Add anchor
Note that all of the characters that you can add directly using specific keyboard shortcuts can also be added using this dropdown menu.

Practice: Insert a Right Curly Apostrophe

Ctrl+Shift+' (Cmd+Shift+' on Mac): This shortcut will add a right curly apostrophe. We do not allow straight apostrophes in text within the LEMDO project. If you add a straight apostrophe to your text, you will receive an error message in Oxygen prompting you to use this command to replace straight apostrophes with curly apostrophes.

Practice: Insert an Ellipsis Character

Use the ellipsis character (…) from your character map instead of typing three spaced periods (. . .) in files. We never want three spaced periods to be used as ellipses. We use the ellipsis character because it is unambiguous, it ensures that our ellipses are standardized across the project, and it allows us to easily change the rendering of ellipses if we choose.
Ctrl+Shift+. (Cmd+Shift+. on Mac): This shortcut will add an ellipsis character. Ensure that you have typed a space on either side of your ellipsis character.
Special Case: Remediate Ellipses
If you are remediating a file, see Replace Ellipses for instructions on encoding editorial elisions indicated by ellipses in annotations.

Practice: Insert an Anchor

Ctrl+Shift+A (Cmd+Shift+A on Mac): This shortcut will add two <anchor> elements to your text. To add anchors on either side of a selection of text:
Highlight the text that you want to add anchors around.
Type Ctrl+Shift+A.
If you only want to add one <anchor> element:
Click where you want to add your anchor.
Type Ctrl+Shift+A.
Delete the second anchor.
For more information on the <anchor> element, see Create Anchors.

Practice: Insert a Pointer

Ctrl+Shift+P (Cmd+Shift+P on Mac): This shortcut will add a <ptr> element with @type="localCit" and an empty @target attribute to your text. You may use this shortcut when you want to point to the text in the modern or semi-diplomatic files of your edition; if you choose to use this shortcut. You must add a value to the @target attribute for your <ptr> to be valid.
Note that if you are not linking to an act, scene, or speech in your own edition, you should not have a @type attribute with the value "localCit". If you use this shortcut to link to something else (i.e., a <div> element in your edition), remove the @type attribute. For more information about encoding the <ptr> element, see Encode Pointer Links.

Practice: Insert a Person Entry

Ctrl+Shift+C (Cmd+Shift+C on Mac): This shortcut will add an empty <person> element. You may use it when you are encoding the character list in the <teiHeader> of your modernized text and if you are encoding entries in the sitewide Personography or Prosopography. This shortcut will provide you with this frame:
<person xml:id="">
  <persName>
    <name/>
    <reg/>
  </persName>
  <note>
    <p/>
  </note>
</person>
You will add the relevant information to the text node of the <name> element, the <reg> , and, if applicable, the <note> element. For more information on encoding character lists, see Encode Character Lists in Modern Texts. For more information on encoding entries in our sitewide Personography and Prosopography, see Personography (PERS1) and Prosopography (PROS1).

Practice: Insert a Split Quotation

Ctrl+Shift+K (Cmd+Shift+K on Mac): This shortcut will add a <quote> element with the attributes you need to encode a quotation spanning multiple lines:
<p>
<!-- ... -->

  <quote xml:id="emdOth_Titus_q_2" next="#emdOth_Titus_q_3" prev="#emdOth_Titus_q_1"/>
  <!-- ... -->
</p>
For more information on encoding split quotations, see Quotations Spanning Multiple Lines.

Special Characters: Encode Escaped Symbols

There are some symbols that you must sometimes escape in XML. Because these symbols are part of the code, you must differentiate them from code when you are using them for another purpose. Read about escaped characters in The World Wide Web Consortium. These include the ampersand and the greater than and less than signs. The table below shows how to escape these characters.
Description Original Character Escaped Character
Ampersand & &amp;
Greater Than > &gt;
Less than < &lt;
Example of an ampersand in a quotation within an annotation note:
<quote>Euery valley shall be exalted, and euery mountaine and hill shall be made lowe: and the crooked shalbe streight, & the rough places plaine</quote>
Example of an ampersand in the title of a work in the bibliography:
<title level="m">Comedies, Histories, Tragedies & Poems of William Shakespeare</title>

Special Characters: Encode Characters from the Character Map

If a word has an accented character (as opposed to a stress mark over a syllable), find it in the character map. Every computer operating system now has a character map built into it, giving you full access to most of the symbols and characters in the Unicode database. There is no need to tag the character, just copy it from your character map. If necessary, you can search the character map by keyword or by Unicode number.
You may also use Insert from Character Map in Oxygen which can be found under Edit in the main toolbar:

                           The Character Map window in Oxygen
Once in you have opened the character map, you can search for the special character you need and press Insert:

                           The edit menu in the Oxygen app with Insert from Character Map... selected
You may also copy and paste commonly used special characters from this table:
Symbol Description Unicode Number
à Latin Capital Letter A With Tilde U+00C3
ã Latin Small Letter A With Tilde U+00E3
Ā Latin Capital Letter A With Macron U+0100
ā Latin Small Letter A With Macron U+0101
Latin Capital Letter E with Tilde U+1EBC
Latin Small Letter E With Tilde U+1EBD
Ē Latin Capital Letter E with Macron U+0112
ē Latin Small Letter E With Macron U+0113
è Latin Small Letter E With Grave U+00E8
ê Latin Small Letter E With Circumflex U+00EA
é Latin Small Letter E With Acute U+00E9
Ĩ Latin Capital Letter I With Tilde U+0128
ĩ Latin Small Letter I With Tilde U+0129
Ī Latin Capital Letter I With Macron U+012A
ī Latin Small Letter I With Macron U+012B
Õ Latin Capital Letter O With Tilde U+00D5
õ Latin Small Letter O With Tilde U+00F5
Ō Latin Capital Letter O With Macron U+014C
ō Latin Small Letter O With Macron U+014D
Ũ Latin Capital Letter U With Tilde U+0168
ũ Latin Small Letter U With Tilde U+0169
Ū Latin Capital Letter U With Macron U+016A
ū Latin Small Letter U With Macron U+016B
Latin Capital Letter Y With Tilde U+1EF8
Latin Small Letter Y With Tilde U+1EF9
Ȳ Latin Capital Letter Y With Macron U+0232
ȳ Latin Small Letter Y With Macron U+0233
ð Latin Small Letter Eth U+00F0
ƿ Latin Letter Wynn U+01BF
If you need to use a non-Latin character in your modern text, search for it in your character map and copy it into your document. Not all non-Latin characters will display equally well on all computers; e.g., older operating systems will often substitute a rectangle or a question mark for characters that they cannot render. You will also want to add a comment to your file giving the Unicode number so that the LEMDO team can help you with the encoding.

Prosopography

Isabella Seales

Isabella Seales is a fourth year undergraduate completing her Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of Victoria. She has a special interest in Renaissance and Metaphysical Literature. She is assisting Dr. Jenstad with the MoEML Mayoral Shows anthology as part of the Undergraduate Student Research Award program.

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Joey Takeda

Joey Takeda is LEMDO’s Consulting Programmer and Designer, a role he assumed in 2020 after three years as the Lead Developer on LEMDO.

Kate LeBere

Project Manager, 2020–2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019–2020. Textual Remediator and Encoder, 2019–2021. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English at the University of Victoria in 2020. During her degree she published papers in The Corvette (2018), The Albatross (2019), and PLVS VLTRA (2020) and presented at the English Undergraduate Conference (2019), Qualicum History Conference (2020), and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute’s Project Management in the Humanities Conference (2021). While her primary research focus was sixteenth and seventeenth century England, she completed her honours thesis on Soviet ballet during the Russian Cultural Revolution. She is currently a student at the University of British Columbia’s iSchool, working on her masters in library and information science.

Martin Holmes

Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVicʼs Humanities Computing and Media Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020. He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.

Navarra Houldin

Project manager 2022–present. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA in History and Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. During their degree, they worked as a teaching assistant with the University of Victoriaʼs Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America.

Nicole Vatcher

Technical Documentation Writer, 2020–2022. Nicole Vatcher completed her BA (Hons.) in English at the University of Victoria in 2021. Her primary research focus was womenʼs writing in the modernist period.

Tracey El Hajj

Junior Programmer 2019–2020. Research Associate 2020–2021. Tracey received her PhD from the Department of English at the University of Victoria in the field of Science and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on the algorhythmics of networked communications. She was a 2019–2020 President’s Fellow in Research-Enriched Teaching at UVic, where she taught an advanced course on Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life. Tracey was also a member of the Map of Early Modern London team, between 2018 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a fellow in residence at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, where she investigated the relationships between artificial intelligence, creativity, health, and justice. As of July 2021, Tracey has moved into the alt-ac world for a term position, while also teaching in the English Department at the University of Victoria.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

Metadata