TXSTEP: Current project status

• it would offer an up-to-date established syntax
  
• it would allow to draft TUSTEP scripts using the same XML editor as when writing XSLT or other XML based scripts
• it would let you enjoy the typical benefits of working with an XML editor, like content completion, highlighting, showing annotations, and, of course, verifying your code
• it would offer - to a certain degree - a self teaching environment by commenting on the scope of every step
• it would avoid many syntactical errors, even compared to the original TUSTEP scripting environment.

This idea was presented to a greater public at the occasion of the 2010 TUSTEP workshop in Blaubeuren and a TextGrid-TUSTEP workshop in January 2010 at Trier University. A first TXSTEP developers workshop at the Media University Stuttgart took place in May 2010. At the 2010 annual meetig of the International TUSTEP User Group (ITUG) in Würzburg, a status report and a first prototype was presented, containing the essential modules for the preparation of word lists and other indexes.

In the meantime, further functions have been integrated. A more advanced prototype covering the essential functions of the most important TUSTEP modules was presented at the 2011 ITUG annual meeting and the TEI Annual Conference; an updated and corrected version, based on TUSTEP version 2012, has be presented during the poster session at DH2012 in July 2012. This version has been exstensively tested by Thomas C. Bernhart from the University of Zürich - it owes to him many ideas for improvement. A new version, containing important functions for critical editing, has been presented at the TEI Conference 2013 in Rome. The current version has profited inter alia from valuable suggestions by Gerrit Br^uning from Freies Deutsches Hochstift in Frankfurt; it has been released just in time for the DH2014 conference in Lausanne where it will be presented in a poster session Critical editing with TXSTEP.

The version February 2015 has been presented at the XML Prague 2015 conference on February 15 (see the video recording).

Also the current version March 2021 (which contains only minor revisions to the previous versions February 2017 and September 2018) is still work in progress, but is advanced enough to make available the most important features of TUSTEP via an established English speaking interface and a self-teaching environment. The version February 2017 has been presented on February 9, 2017, at the unconference of XML Prague 2017.

The download package contains some 120 elementary and more demanding exercises together with corresponding data files and their solutions by TXSTEP scripts. Self-teaching should therefore not present serious problems.