Torchio presses XML-TEI P5 encoded texts into static digital scholarly editions: multi-page sites with reading text, critical apparatus, indices, maps and data exports, published from a git repository, with no server and no database. It is a prototype under development, and an experiment: how much of the editorial behaviour of real TEI can be recovered without configuration, and without inventing what the source does not say.

Three ways to press an edition

• In the browser: choose the files of a TEI P5 edition (the ODD too, if you have one) and it is pressed into a static site on your machine. Compose it in the panel, add your own pages in Markdown, download the result. Nothing is uploaded anywhere, and nothing is kept.
• From the command line: node tools/press.js --site edition.xml out/, on a file or on a whole folder. This is the fuller route: it applies the reconciliation and georeferencing files, stamps the colophon, carries the sources, and reports what it could not do. See USAGE.
• The repository presses itself: put the TEI in a repository with a small workflow, and every push presses the edition again and publishes it on GitHub Pages. The edition is then a git repository with a history, which is the form this project argues for.

Editions to look at

• The demonstration editions: nine editions pressed with Torchio, in their own repository, so that materials with limited rights stay apart from the engine. Among them a critical edition with a three-register apparatus, a collated tradition of fifty-four witnesses, a graphematic transcription, a documentary transcription with hands and writing operations, a correspondence, and a Specimen built for demonstration, with imaginary witnesses and didactic variants, declared as such on its title page.

How the project works

• README: what it is, how to run it, what it depends on (nothing).
• Principles: the method, the wager the project is testing, the survey of what already exists, and the audits.
• Corrections: every correction a real edition has demanded of the engine, dated and attributed. The open ones are there too.
• Roadmap: what is urgent, what is possible, and the research directions.

Desiderata

Wishes, requests and ideas, from anyone, in any language: open a thread in the Discussions. No fork or pull request needed.

Torchio is designed and maintained by Emmanuela Carbé (Ca' Foscari University of Venice, DSU-VeDPH). The engine is MIT; the rights of the materials in the demonstration editions are recorded in their own repository.

Torchio, version 0.2.0-beta.2, August 2026. See the changelog.