Page breaks out of order for writing in multiple orientations

?Hello all,

We are working on a edition of the complete writings and letters of the painter Mondrian. One of the notebooks that he used presents an interesting challenge to the encoder.

The writing in the book uses all four possible orientations:
- 'normal writing', starting in the top left corner of the page, proceeding to the next page when the page is full
- 'reversed': the book was reversed and used normally, so the writing now begins in what is from the original perspective the bottom right corner, and the next page of a text is now on the 'previous' page (given the main page numbering)
- 'landscape': writing begins bottom left, lines are vertical, proceeding to the next page when the page is full
- 'landscape reversed': writing begins top right, proceeding to previous page when page is full

We want to present to the user both a physical view of the notebook, where the pages are presented in sequence, and a logical view, that presents the reconstructed text fragments in their intended order. We'd much prefer to construct both from a single transcription.

In all the encoding project I was involved with up to now, it has been the case that the physical view of the manuscript was generated from the sequence of pb-elements. In the XML therefore, the pb-elements had to be ordered as in the manuscript. This has never presented a problem. But if we do that in this case, for e.g. the fragments that start at the end of the notebook this lead would lead to unhappy consequences for div- and p -elements.

Suppose a div that starts on p. 100 continues on p . 99, and we keep the pbs in sequence. Then the div that starts on p. 100 will have to be closed on p. 99. That obviously won't work, so we'll have to split the div and p and who knows segs and quotes and hi-elements and connect them using next- and prev-attributes, something like this:

<pb n="99"/>
<div xml:id="div-123" prev="#div-122">
  <p xml:id="p-789" prev="#p-788">
  <!-- text continued on p. 99 -->
  </p>
</div>
<pb n="100"/>
<div xml:id="div-122" next="#div-123">
  <p xml:id="p-788" next="#p-789">
  <!-- text starts on p. 100 -->
  </p>
</div>

As that is an error-prone mess, we have no choice but to reverse the pb's:

<pb n="100"/>
<div xml:id="div-122">
  <p xml:id="p-788">
  <!-- text starts on p. 100 -->
  <pb n="99"/>
  <!-- text continued on p. 99 -->
  </p>
</div>

Which is obviously better.

The orientation of the writing on the page can be expressed using the rotate attribute on a zone element corresponding to the pb.

I can't think of another reasonable way of doing this, but I wanted to ask whether there are other ideas for solving this.

Thanks,
Peter