To indicate that our reference edition considers a letter, word or passage to be illegible, corrupt, a deturpation or a locus desperatus, we use the cruxsymbol: "in this text †spfh† an incomprehensible text".

The <unclear> tag indicates these illegible passages. It has the following syntax:

<unclear source="#editorquesea" reason="illegible">texto que no se entiende</unclear>

The @source attribute is optional, but it is useful to specify it if our edition is based on more than one reference edition.

The @reasonattribute is also optional, but if you know it, there’s no harm in adding it, preferably in English: illegible, inaudible, faded, background_noise, eccentric_ductus, etc.

If the <unclear> tag bypasses the nesting hierarchy (within a number of verses, for example), use the system described in Syntax of the Diacritical Marks, with the attribute @unit="unclear" for the tag <milestone/>.