Digital scholarly editions, while differing in editorial goals, encoding depth, and source material, share many operational steps—digitisation, OCR, validation, transformation, publication, versioning, and archiving. Often, these steps are either done manually and/or implemented in project-specific scripts.

This paper presents a workflow automation tool freeing editors and developers of infrastructure from the necessity to perform these repeating tasks themselves. It combines several well-established tools to create flexible workflows that can easily be adapted to a projects needs while still being rooted on the same operational principles, combining the need to adjust a workflow to a project’s needs with a sustainable and scalable infrastructure.

The workflow integrates OCR and layout recognition, post processing, schema validation, version control, publication, and long-term archiving, allowing for fully automated flows and manual intervention as needed. Workflow orchestration is implemented using Prefect, a lightweight, Python-based framework that enables event-driven and sequential execution of discrete tasks. Each step is explicitly defined, logged, and documented, ensuring traceability and reproducibility as well as enabling projects to add or modify steps as required.

Such a workflow enforces consistent TEI structures through automated validation and controlled transformations, supporting interoperability across platforms and facilitating reuse—and consistent tagging is an important cornerstone in creating sustainable editions.

Automation has two important impacts besides reducing repetitive tasks: large amounts of texts can be easily converted to TEI—which might be prohibitively time consuming when done manually–, and it means that a basic TEI representation of a text can be easily and quickly realised, improving access to written heritage.