Jeroen Hellingman writes:
 > texts that
 > include one or more of the following
 >
 > - complicated tables, sometimes spanning multiple pages.

Not sure why this is a problem? Can you elucidate?

 > - Greek, Persian, Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew, and numerous Indic scripts.

Are these more than a font problem? Yes, I know thats a big problem,
but conceptually. Oh, and a writing direction problem :-}

 > - aligned word for word translations
that *is* a fun topic

 > - complicated mathematical formulas

If you are interested in some work I did yesterday on how to include
MathML in a TEI XML DTD,let me know

 > - genealogical diagrams
why are these different from other diagrams? Do they represent a
special case

 > For many of these I don't know how to represent them in TEI, let alone
 > TEI lite

what virtue _per se_ is there in trying to stick with TEI Lite?

 > and automatic processing of them is probably still a far-away dream.
processing to what, that is the question

 > fact, I have a bunch of macro's in TeX that can make things
 > presentable (but not fancy)
 > without any SGML processing whatever -- just feed TeX the macro's and then
 > TEI file and voila...

You are probably using SGML, but if you are willing to use XML, have
you looked at David Carlisle's xmltex, which is a complete XML parser
in TeX, which does what you describe? It has excellent features,
including being namespace-aware

Sebastian Rahtz