Dear list, I am sorry for bringing up yet another whitespace question. I almost believe that in XML the devil lives in the whitespaces. Also, it is quite possible that our problem is specific to our particular situation and of no interest to other projects. But then again, maybe someone is able to help nonetheless. We deal with TEI xml documents recording linebreaks that in many cases are not meant to represent a word boundary: <lb n="016_011"/>que con el pre<lb break="no" rendition="#noHyphen" n="016_012"/>sidente o juez que reside en la prouincia: puede <lb n="016_013"/>hazer thesoreros y receptores en su prouincia: In order to improve readability of the XML source, all our lines begin at the leftmost position of the line no matter the nesting level the current the paragraph is at. The exception is lines that begin with four spaces in order to align the @n-attribute with other lines and yet have the lb-element begin without intervening whitespace at the end of the preceding line/word fragment. But when I edit the document in author mode, it removes the linebreak within the element, so that the first of the following is a very long line and the snippet is only two lines long: <lb_n="016_011"/>que_con_el_pre<lb_break="no"_rendition="#noHyphen"_n="016_012"/>sidente_o_juez_que_reside_en_la_prouincia:_puede <lb n="016_013"/>hazer thesoreros y receptores en su prouincia: (Whitespace and indenting preferences are mentioned below.) Now our workflow relies on an external file providing links to certain places in the TEI file: <a href="W0004.xml#line=449;column=1">016_013</a> Therefore it is somewhat annoying that editing the TEI leads to ("hard") lines being drawn together and the external file increasingly pointing to wrong places. I understand that author mode parses the XML into a DOM tree and re-serializes it on save, so I don't know if this behaviour can be changed at all. But then what would you suggest how we should be approaching this problem? (Can we point to the relevant place based on the @n-attribute of the lb element? If we had to provide all the lbs with @xml:ids I think it would thwart our attempts to make the xml sources better readable. And all of this would help us with linking the two files, but the xml file would still end up with bad readability.) Thank you for any idea, Andreas P.S. I have selected the "Preserve empty lines", "Preserve text as it is" and "Preserve line breaks in attributes" in Options | Preferences | Editor/Format/XML and added "*" to the "Preserve Space" Elements. I also think I have deactivated pretty printing everywhere I could. In Editor | Edit Modes | Author | Format and indent, I have chosen "only the modified content". -- Dr. Andreas Wagner Project "The School of Salamanca" Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz and Institute of Philosophy Goethe University Frankfurt http://salamanca.adwmainz.de IGF HP 25 / R 2.455 Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1 60629 Frankfurt am Main Tel. +49 (0)69/798-32774 Fax +49 (0)69/798-32794