After several years of development, the transition to the new version of the Manuscriptorium digital library was completed last autumn. The development, however, is still ongoing—the most significant and recent part of which is the TEI-compatible full-text module. As a result, Manuscriptorium offers its users an alternative core that shifts the central perspective from visual representation of digitized documents to textual content, with images serving as a complement to the texts they contain.

The overall objective is to build a solid and stable infrastructure, enabling the community of scholars as well as the general public to read, study, and research the historical texts within a wider Central European digital context. At present, the main focus lies on converting older editions of historical texts of Bohemian origin. The editions are then correlated not only with the documents forming their textual basis but also with other known witnesses, thereby reviving such editions in a broader and more dynamic context. In the extended process of establishing the exact method of data preparation, their subsequent processing, and visualization workflows, we have come across several methodological ‘nooks and crannies’ for which the current TEI Guidelines offer no proper solution. Thus, a rather creative approach was at times necessary, and even a few changes and extensions of the TEI standard in use proved unavoidable, primarily in relation to the problem of directly connecting digitized fragmentary witnesses of varying extent and content with the full texts of the editions.

From the end-user perspective, the edition module consists of two components: an application for advanced viewing of the texts integrated with the digitized images of original documents, and a catalog enabling high-granularity searching across the edition database. The essential data persistence has already been secured by the overarching Manuscriptorium resolver infrasctructure. By means of full IIIF compatibility, the texts are correlated with the digitized documents from Manuscriptorium's content core as well as from external image repositories. Parallel yet differentiated browsing of texts and images, along with the additional visualization of modern translations or transcriptional variants, has also been successfully implemented. The next developmental phase will be primarily dedicated to processing and visualizing complex critical apparatuses. On the whole, compared with other historical-text databases, our principal purpose is to provide users with highly curated—and thus reliable—textual content and to make it as accessible as possible, not least through an engaging and easy-to-navigate user interface.

In the paper, all the above-mentioned aspects of the development and the current state of the module will be discussed, with the presentation of methodological problems relating to the markup, its specifics and broader applicability, among the key objectives. Quite naturally, adhering as closely as possible to the TEI Guidelines, we aim to invite critical feedback to our work from the community best suited for it.