Daniel O'Donnell wrote:

>Perhaps JStor has the best solution horribilis dictu: encode the
>linguistics of the poem (line divs, words, syntax) in markup and present
>the graphic information (indentation etc.) in a graphic overlay?
>
>
You could try doing it in markup by using two namespaces, TEI
for structure, XSL FO for graphical stuff. Maybe. This is rather the way
Word 2003 works, interleaving two different streams of XML.
Adobe's PDF format has another idea, which is to store XML inside
the graphic representation.

If you'd all got stuck into LaTeX instead of this poxy <> stuff,
you'd be laughing; you make up your markup language as you go along,
and insert direct graphical commands as you like. As it does not
have the silly requirement for nested trees, you can get away with
a lot more incoherent structures.

I think that I'd feel inclined to use processing instructions in
some of these cases:

<? turn left here and continue across the statue's toes ?>

if you see what I mean.

--
Sebastian Rahtz
Information Manager, Oxford University Computing Services
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431

OSS Watch: JISC Open Source Advisory Service
http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk