----- Original Message ----- From: Jon Noring <jon@noring.name> <snipped poetry indent discussion> Fundamentally, it comes down to whether the indentation is structual (it provides some author intended meaning to the poem) or simply presentational (the type setter put those indents there to make everything "pretty"). First argument for structural ... The author can use indention differently for different poems within the same book. That, to me, means that the indention pattern has some meaning for that author. Eg: It was intentional that the third and fifth lines are indented and the seventh and ninth lines were double indented. Yet, in the next poem, every other line is indented equally. That is an intentional indentation and implies meaning to it. Second argument for structural ... In the Chicago Manual of Style (reference I used is here: http://nutsandbolts.washcoll.edu/chicago.html), it does include an indent in the quoted poem it gives as the first example. Since the style guide thinks that indention is important and should be preserved, I think that argues for the preservation in our texts as well. Argument for using   (non-breaking space) or   (quad space) ... The full TEI spec (much less TEI-Lite) does not seem to have a tag element to control indents in a poem. Hence, the use of spaces to specify those indents. With the added benefit of being XML format independent. If our text is converted to some other flavor of XML, the indents are kept intact. Whereas if we tried to create a custom tag element to control indention, that tag element (and hence the information) would most likely be lost if the text was convert to some other flavor of XML. Josh PS After reading the full TEI spec section on poetry, I'm not sure at all anymore on how to tag an entire poem as a single entity. ie, if you have two separate poems in a book of poetry, what element(s) do you use to mark one poem as a separate from the other? <lg> markup seems to indicate "a stanza, refrain, verse paragraph, etc." (http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/VE.html) it mentions using <div> to mark off sections of a long poem into Cantos or Books... Should I use the same <div> markup for setting off individual poems as separate entities?