1. Prefer a fully preserved reading; if none survives, show only surviving letters.
2. Within the same evidence class, rank by the starting year of the published date range.
3. On a tie, use the lower Gregory–Aland papyrus number.
4. Attach sigla only for witnesses preserving the selected reading to the displayed extent. Keep partial and supplied witnesses distinct in notes.
5. Preserve dissenting readings in provenance.

This selects a public display; it does not claim the earliest surviving reading is necessarily the autograph.

• Source order is preserved by contiguous forward scan.
• Vaticanus is the primary structural guide because it is early, Greek, and nearly continuous.
• Sinaiticus and Byzantine may corroborate placement where Vaticanus is absent or uncertain.
• A guide controls row location only—not wording, survival, selection, or English.
• Transpositions receive explicit provenance; word-count balancing is forbidden.

Preserved word

The transcription retains every letter. Individual letters may still carry damage markings.

Partly preserved word

Some letters are missing. Only surviving letters are displayed.

Not extant

No papyrus text is available for this position. Another tradition does not fill the gap.

αDamaged letter

A dotted underline and tinted background mark damaged traces retained by CNTR.

·Missing letter

A middle dot holds the place of a missing character; the proposed letter is withheld.

†English for a proposed reading

The English gloss describes a proposed complete reading of a partly preserved word. It does not certify the missing letters.

Where a verified free image is available, the colored indicator links to it. These markings do not independently certify the physical ink.

The corpus retains every original source coordinate, including editorial reconstructions, while separating surviving text from proposed restorations. Corpus construction and page loading enforce the same word-level admission rule. A build check rejects data that would silently reintroduce supplied words or completed missing letters. These checks verify fidelity to the declared transcriptions; they do not certify that every manuscript image has been inspected.

Admission and alignment are separate. Papyrus attestation determines what appears; neighboring certified source coordinates and the comparative grid determine placement. A different reading normally shares the same row when it occupies the same position in the sentence—the disagreement is the evidence being displayed. Multiple papyrus word-units may share one cell when another tradition expresses the corresponding unit differently. Agreement with Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Byzantine, or another tradition is never an admission requirement. Separate papyrus-only or transposition rows are reserved for additions, genuinely unavailable comparison positions, and order differences that the shared grid cannot represent honestly. External scholarly review, pinned source revisions, and the separate English audit remain additional certification layers.