Wow, I'd never thought of <lb> preceding a line (certianly not the first). I've always used them as following. Same is true for pb and cb, though I suppose I'd put the following p. number on @n were I to number them.

I wonder though if you should number a pb cb or lb, however. The tag doesn't really contain the page, or whatever, after all. It is a point *between* pages, lines, columns, etc. (think about lb and l. <l> naturally has a line number because it contains a line. <lb> on the other hand marks a point and so sshouldn't have @n.

What we really need is a <pb/> : <pg></pg> pairing though that can rapidly cause hierarchy problems.

One solution might be this:

text <pb> <milestone type=pagenumber n=2> more text...

The only reason for offerng this is a) the pb describes a point (correctly IMO) and the milestone is not incorrect in reporting that it is on p. 2.

This is a good topic for a firt entry in a best practice for medievalists guide.! -dan

-----Original Message----- From: Murray McGillivray Date: 10/9/04 11:31 To: Digital Medievalist Community mailing list Subj: [dm-l] TEI page breaks, line breaks

Digital Medievalist Journal (Inaugural Issue Fall 2004). Call for papers: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/cfp.htm ---------------- I'm sorry, but this is a bit of a technical question. Please delete if you hate those.

I wonder if anyone who has worked with using TEI P3-4 to encode manuscript or printed book transcriptions or editions could tell me if a local standard among medievalists is developing for the use of "milestone" elements that have to do with the arrangement of the physical object, such as line break, column break and page break tags.

Specifically, I'm wondering if the attributes given to these tags (such as 'n') usually refer to the page (line, etc.) following or the page (line, etc.) preceding the milestone element. My *guess* is that these breaks are usually connected to the text following, but I don't see a logic in the tags themselves that would require that and my experience of what people do is pretty limited to my own narrow part of the field.

I should comment that part of my doubt stems from the way pb, lb, and cb are described in the Guidelines. Both pb and cb say "marks the boundary between one . . . [X] and the next in a standard reference system," apparently indicating that there should be an X already there before the first of these tags is used in a file; whereas lb "marks the start of a new (typographic) line in some edition or version of a text," indicating that it should be used before the first (typographic) line. I do not believe that either the implied variation in application (to a "standard reference system" on the one hand and "some edition or version" on the other) or the stated variation in placement (before or between bits of text) is intended in any strong sense--probably at all--by the editors, by the way. Several milestone elements (milestone itself, handshift, etc.) do make reasonably clear, either in their Guidelines description or in the examples given, that they are meant to be used at the beginning of a section of text to which they refer .

Murray McGillivray

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