Texts – documents of all types, and especially written documents—are the bedrock of humanities inquiry. In the digital age, scholars have embraced the ability to digitize and encode the key features of texts, for use in teaching, research, cultural heritage projects, and resources for the public. The most expressive guidelines for encoding texts, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), is the de facto standard in the humanities and offers numerous advantages over other formats – chief among which are that it is a non-proprietary, open standard, driven by humanities researchers themselves, and highly customizable for each project's unique needs. However, having mastered TEI, practitioners often struggle to acquire the additional skills needed to transform their TEI into web pages or other formats. This presents not only a technical challenge but a sustainability challenge.

TEI Publisher is a free, open source software package designed to empower students, scholars, and textually-oriented projects to create modern, dynamic, searchable websites for their texts. Since most TEI projects have their own encoding conventions and scholarly aims, TEI Publisher allows users to customize every aspect of their project's online presentation. At its heart, TEI Publisher leverages the TEI's Processing Model facility, a TEI-based vocabulary for encoding transformation rules for converting TEI into web pages, as well as other media types, such as PDF and ebook. TEI Publisher is highly modular, so it can be integrated into larger systems, or it can single-handedly power an entire website.