The idea of markup is to capture information explicitly. To capture explicitly the information that two pAdas make a line and that two (or sometimes one or three or more) make a verse, one needs different elements for pAdas and for lines. That is why I use the seg element, which conveniently does have a type attribute to specify what it is. caesura or space elements also are useful for marking the location of breaks, but don't explicitly mark pAdas. The lg/l/seg markup is as easy to process as the other alternatives proposed. We send lg elements with l and seg children to our meter analyzer without a hitch using regular expressions to extract the text. Rendering is also not a problem. Putting four lines in l elements leaves the problem that Anustubh meters usually put two pAdas per line with sandhi while longer meters may not. An l-element was conceived for a line, not for a pAda. Yours, Peter ****************************** Peter M. Scharf, President The Sanskrit Library scharf@sanskritlibrary.org mailto:scharf@sanskritlibrary.org http://sanskritlibrary.org http://sanskritlibrary.org/ ******************************