All documents are preceded by an analytical summary, in which they are classified according to their nature: letter, relation, treaty, notes, answer, etc. The addressee and the subject are also identified, as well as place and date of writing and the archival information. In these analytical summaries, we also include, when possible, the different copy number if available.

In documents entirely written in Latin, a Portuguese translation is provided in the next page. Sentences, phrases, or words in Latin that occur in documents written in Portuguese are highlighted in bold, so as to be easily identified, and followed by their translation in Portuguese within square brackets.

In documents that contain Chinese characters, traditional characters are used and their translation is given in footnote.

The rules of palaeographical transcription used are based on a compromise between those of diplomatic edition and those of critical edition, always being as close as possible to the manuscript.

The main aim of the transcription rules is to make these documents easily legible, however doing so without disregarding the way they were written at their time. We abide by, as a general principle, the following rules, established by Eduardo Borges Nunes:

- spelling of words is always respected, keeping any phonological and lexical written archaisms;

- <i>, <j>, <y> variations, as well as <u> and <v> are kept, in spite of the phonetic value given to the letters; the same principle applies to double consonants;

- abbreviations are expanded in italics;

- nasalisations are kept;

- a change in folium is signposted;

- any underlined text is kept;

- any diacritic and punctuation marks are kept, except when the manuscript’s author introduces a capital letter to mark the beginning of a new sentence and does not mark the end of the previous sentence with the respective punctuation;

- the use of capital letter/upper case and lower case in the source text is kept;

- word separation and union is made according to modern use, in order to make reading and comprehension easier;

- apostrophe is used, as well as clitics originally hyphenated;

- any textual issues (blank spaces, and any scribbled, crossed, repeated, or interlineated words, as well as blurs) are mentioned in footnote. The same procedure is used in case of copyist and transcription mistakes. In this case, words are amended in the body of the text, in order to not compromise its legibility, and the form used by the author or copyist is kept in footnote;

- any corrections in words are given in square brackets;

- any doubt in the palaeographic reading in a manuscript is noted as (?);

- any word spelled in an uncommon way is signed with (sic);

- a word copied from one page onto the next is not transcribed;

- the layout of a document is kept both in its initial and final formulae.

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