A light-weight, open source tool specifically designed to create digital editions from XML-encoded texts, freeing the scholar from the burden of web programming and enabling the final user to browse, explore and study digital editions by means of a user-friendly interface.
EVT 1
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Demo v 1.3
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Everything is created around the data and the encoded text itself: by applying a single style sheet to the TEI XML file holding the transcription of a document, an XSLT 2.0 transformation chain is started and the end result is a web-based application – a mix of HTML 5, CSS3 and JavaScript – which can be easily shared on the Web.
Besides presenting the digital scans of the original manuscript (if available) linked to the corresponding text of the edition, it provides some other great features, such as the support for diplomatic and interpretative edition levels, an integrated search engine, the lists of named entities and SVG diagrams of the quire structure (thanks to VisColl).

Browse the sample editions to see some example of digital edition that can be created with EVT:

The 1.3 is the final release for EVT 1.*: after a short period to gather feedback and fix possible bugs in this version, the source code – which has been moved to a public repository on GitHub – is now fully shared with the user community to be modified and/or enhanced as other developers may see fit.

EVT 2
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Demo v beta2
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The increasing number of available widgets has made the general layout quite complex with regard to the interaction between them, and complicated to handle. The need for more flexibility and modularity led us to a completely new infrastructure, based on MVC design pattern.
The XSLT stylesheets have been abandoned in favor of a set of JavaScript parsers specifically written to retrieve edition content directly from the XML file. Edition data is then saved in a JSON structure, organized in such a way that it can be easily and rapidly accessed when needed. The final styling of documents is entrusted to CSS style-sheets and is easily customizable.

Browse the sample editions to see some example of digital edition that can be created with EVT2:



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About

EVT was born in the context of the Digital Vercelli Book project, which has been available in beta form for more than one year, but it has evolved in a tool suitable to fit different texts and needs. For example, it is now being used to publish the digital edition of the Codice Pelavicino manuscript, a medieval codex preserving charters dating back to the XIII century. The continuous development and need to adapt it to different types of documents and TEI-encoded texts has shifted the development focus towards creation of a more general tool for the web publication of TEI-based documents, able to cater for multiple use cases.

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EVT 2: main features

Critical edition support. Enlarged critical apparatus, variant heat map, witnesses collation and variant filtering are some of the main features developed for the critical edition support.

Bookmark. Direct reference to the current view of the web application, considering view mode, current document, page and edition level, eventual collated witnesses and selected apparatus entry.

High level of customization. The editor can customize both the user interface layout and the appearance of the graphical components.

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Future

Currently, the development team is mainly focused on EVT 2. One of our most important goals is to reach feature parity with EVT 1, until this is achieved the former version will continue to be developed and improved.

We also plan to enhance it with additional features: traditional critical apparatus layers, image-text linking leading to selected witness variants, very high resolution image viewer, GIS-like support to show named entities in a map, and more.

EVT is distributed as open source software, all the current code base is available on GitHub.