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While working on the procedure of identifying workshops, styles, and artisans responsible for the production of inscriptions, our team encountered the problem of precise description of letter shapes. It became transparent to us that our general system of guidelines for the identification of workshops and styles required a simple, short, transposable between different regions, and yet unambiguous way of referring to specific letter shapes. In other words, a controlled vocabulary for Greek (and later Latin) epigraphical palaeography became an issue of utmost importance. Not willing to unnecessarily multiply existing solutions, we have consulted published controlled vocabularies in epigraphy, such as:
The survey proved, however, that the focus of these vocabularies is different from the needs of our project. Europeana offers vocabularies for describing the material, execution technique, type of inscription, object type, decoration, dating criteria, and state of preservation. FAIR Epigraphy vocabularies have so far published terms and definitions for the types (or genres) of inscriptions regarding their contents. Finally, the Biblissima+ project will offer a fork of the EpiVoc : thésaurus épigraphique (a multilingual epigraphical thesaurus first developed by M. Brunet in the frame of the Opentheseo project). It covers a variety of issues connected with epigraphy though the lettering is seemingly out of its scope, at least during the current stage of its development.
In this situation, we retoured to handbooks of epigraphical palaeography to check how their authors dealt with describing letters shapes and if they had established any regular phrasing. The works consulted included old classics and modern attempts to systematize epigraphy. As we were also interested in the ways of recording letter shapes in languages other than English, this was duly represented in the selection of reference works: