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Changing the presentation via ODD

If you followed the steps so far and opened one of the sermons, you will notice that – while the default rendition of the text looks fine – some details are not quite right. For example, each sermon begins with the bible passage of the day and this should stand out a bit more.

We therefore need to change the ODD, barth.odd, which we created in the previous chapter. You have the choice between writing the ODD by hand (it is TEI after all) or using a form-based visual ODD editor. Both approaches can be combined and mixed. The visual editor saves the ODD in a non-destructive way, preserving any information not related to the processing models. It is therefore safe to switch between hand-editing the ODD and using the visual editor. Just make sure you reload the visual editor view after modifying the source XML and vice versa. That said, visual editor is specifically tailored to editing processing models so it will be likely the fastest and safest way to edit your ODD.

Important

If you edit the ODD XML by hand, there are some caveats you need to be aware of: the visual editor will automatically check if there are existing elementSpec s for a new element in any of the ODDs your ODD inherits from. When editing by hand, you need to do this yourself. It's best to always have the base teipublisher.odd open on the side. It is located in the same collection as your odd, i.e. /db/apps/tei-publisher/odd.

For example, to modify the element spec for dateline, check teipublisher.odd, where you will find a definition already. Copy it over to your ODD and start modifying it.

Pay attention to the @mode attribute on elementSpec. You must set this to change if you are overwriting an elementSpec which already exists in the inherited ODDs. If not, set it to add.