Lost characters, quantity approximate

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

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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 the gap element. 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 .

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 usually given the value "lost" (although other values are possible).
• 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.).

For cases in which the editor can provide only an approximate extent, the following attribute should be used:

• precision should be given a value of "low" to denotes the fact that there is a degree of imprecision about the value given in quantity (i.e. circa).