jared said:

TEI has my attention, you can bet on it.

glad to hear it jared. the more people doing .tei e-texts, the faster the library will get converted to consistency...

The ability to use one TEI file to spew out output in PDF, HTML, PDB and other formats is very interesting

it certainly is! having one "master" format is _superior_ to trying to maintain a wide variety of different formats. it's an exercise in overkill to jump through all the hoops of .tei in order to get the benefit that you can get by concentrating on obtaining consistency _directly_, and much more easily, by choosing to make the _text_version_ your "master format"... but hey, as long as _you_ -- the people doing the .tei work -- don't mind wasting your time and energy jumping the hoops, _i_ certainly don't mind you wasting your time and energy... you might want to think twice about using "multiple formats" as your major selling-point in convincing people to move to .tei, because once they see my work and realize they can get those "multiple formats" just as easily from a text-file "master" format, they might become very reluctant to jump through your .tei hoops.

and the ability to do so also will cut down on the time a PP'er needs to do his or her book.

right... a .tei workflow will make post-processing _so_ much easier. backlog? what backlog? right...

Yes, I know the HTML output will be sort of "cookie-cutter", to be blunt

well, that's a good thing, not a bad thing. it means that those files will be leveraged into the future because they'll be consistent. the way that "value" gets "added" to the e-texts is having other programs be able to process them. consistency allows those programs to do that job. the reason all those hand-crafted .html versions were a waste of time is because their idiosyncrasy means other programs can't grok their structure...

but you can easily hand-edit the HTML later to fix problems posed by the TEI output. Ditto with the text. 

no no no no no no no. first, "hand-editing" takes _time_ and_energy_. worse, it has to be re-done when you regenerate. and worst of all, it messes up that _consistency_ which i just mentioned above, which is the jewel... do _not_ do hand-editing! if you find you need to, then go back and rework the converter _instead_... improving the converter-routine is a _good_ use of time. it saves you work down the line, and keeps consistency...

TEI's not that hard to learn (it's basically specialized XML, for lack of a better term) and if you know HTML, you can do a TEI project.

of course, if you used a text-version as the "master format", you wouldn't even have to know .html to make the e-texts... -bowerbird