Hi all,

I have a question: I am encoding texts out of a textbook. The texts are
in prose (paragraphs and sentences) but the pages are lineated (it is a
second language textbook and the numbers are used to facilitate in-class
translation work).

My question involves conventions for encoding the beginnings of new
lines when these correspond with a paragraph beginning. Should I put an
lb right after the opening paragraph tag?

An obvious answer is to treat rhetorical structure and copy-text
lineation as independent features and leave it up to my XSL to deal with
presentation. In other words, when one is ordering the page by copy-text
lineation, the xsl would essentially ignore the paragraph marking and
just break the running text at the instances of lb; when my interest was
the rhetorical organisation, my XSL would ignore the instances of lb and
just transform the instances of tei:p. 

Of course this raises the question of what to do about the other
physical feature of paragraphs in my copy-text: indentation. If I'm
going to be a complete purist about my separation of layout features and
rhetorical structure, I presumably also should be putting space tags in
or something as well.

But then I wonder if I'm not being silly: in this approach, a simple
paragraph would begin something like this

<p n="2"><space quantity="1" unit="em"/><lb n="3">Lorem ipsum dolor sit
amet

More importantly, both the space and the lb are immediately derivable
from the fact that the thing is also the beginning of a paragraph; it is
a little bit harder to work out the line numbers of paragraph beginnings
if each paragraph can also contain an arbitrary number of line breaks,
but it isn't impossible. So from a simplicity of data perspective, it
would probably be better to treat <p> as being equivalent to <p
n="2"><space quantity="1" unit="em"/><lb n="3">

Anybody have a suggested practice?

-dan





I

-- 
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Associate Professor of English
Director, Digital Medievalist Project http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/
Chair, Text Encoding Initiative http://www.tei-c.org/

Department of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Vox +1 403 329-2377
Fax +1 403 382-7191
Email: [log in to unmask]
WWW: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/