On Fri, 11 Feb 2005, Susan wrote:

> I am encoding a set of World War II era memoirs.  The document is
> handwritten with single-spaced lines, but the original author
> occasionally left 2 or 3 blank lines between paragraphs.
> In some places he added a date in this blank space,
> then began a new paragraph.  Quite often,
> though, he left only a blank lines.

Here are some options, some a little bit tag-abusive,
as I am sure to hear:) :

<P><SPACE DIM="vertical" EXTENT="3 lines"> ...</P>

<P><LB><LB><LB> ... </P>

<P><GAP DESC="blank" EXTENT="3 lines" REASON="to be filled in later">
... </P>

<MILESTONE UNIT="entry" N="unnumbered" REND="3 blank lines">

Some of the decisions will depend on how you are tagging
the rest of the document, and the dates that appear
in those gaps now. More importantly, they will depend
on whether you are primarily tagging the appearance or
the logical structure of the memoirs, e.g. (at one
extreme) merely tagging line by line with <LB>s or (at the
other) tagging each paragraph as <DIVx TYPE="entry">
with <OPENER><DATELINE><DATE> (etc.). In the latter
case, for example, if the gaps seemed to be (in effect)
blank openers, then you could place a space or a gap
within opener tags; but if you are not sure, or not
always sure,  what the gaps mean, a more agnostic
approach limited to the physical appearance might be
indicated. -- pfs


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Paul Schaffner | [log in to unmask] | http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pfs/
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