The letters of past centuries make up a documentation of exceptional utility for both historians and philologists. For this reason, the principles that have governed the transcription have been to facilitate reading in order to grasp the content and, at the same time, to respect the particularities of the original text. For this reason, the essential interventions have been carried out to guarantee both purposes. Taking into account that the transcribed letters, in general, are written in Catalan or Spanish, the guidelines that have been applied, in relation to the grammar of each language, are the following:
a) The score has been updated.
b) The current criteria have been applied in the use of upper and lower case letters.
c) It has been accentuated in accordance with current regulations.
d) The phonetic features of the originals have been respected, as far as possible, particularly in the repetition of letters and in the characteristic use of the "c" or the “s”, e.g. “teu de cor cempra”.
e) The words that appear together or separately in the manuscript have been adapted to the current regulations: the forms that the original joins, but which are currently separated, have been indicated with the full stop, e.g. “para·que”; and the units separated by the author, but which are currently written together, e.g. "sobre_tot", have been marked with an underscore ( _ ).
f) In Catalan texts, the apostrophe is used both in vowel elisions provided for by current regulations and in unions not provided for, e.g. “que'm”, although, in this case, we have also opted for the formula “que·[e]m”.
g) In Catalan texts, the hyphen is restored in cases of enclitic pronouns, e.g. “abandonar-los”. In these cases, the verb and the pronoun almost always go together in the originals.
h) Brackets [ ] are inserted to indicate the letters that have been added.
i) Angular parentheses are introduced < > to indicate words, syllables or letters that appear in the original but that distort the reading and, therefore, should be elided.
j) If there is an underlined element in the original, it has been kept in the transcription. Crossed out or crossed out elements have been reproduced if it has been possible to read, but introducing a horizontal line in the middle.
k) All the abbreviations that it has been possible to identify have been developed.
l) The pad symbol [#] has been indicated if a word that is difficult to read, illegible or affected by paper deterioration has been presented.
m) The [sic] is used (from the Latin sic, thus, abbreviation of sic erat scriptum, as it was written) to state that the word(s) or expression that precedes it has been transferred literally, although it may seem like a transcription error. Usually these are carelessness or blunders by the person who wrote the letter.