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Lodel (Logiciel d'edition electronique) is the name of the CMS which drives Open Editions, one of Europe's leading open access publishers. Back in 2009, Marin Dacos announced at the TEI council meeting in Lyon that Lodel would start using a TEI schema for its internal processing, while continuing to accept manuscripts for publication in any of the commonly used office document formats. Documents would be worked on in ODT, and automatically converted to a simple TEI schema for internal processing, from which they would be converted for publication on the web and on paper.Documentation subsequently appeared on how to prepare documents in TEI for processing by Lodel (in French at http://lodel.org/701 and also in English). An XSD schema for it is documented at http://lodel.org/715.This blog entry summarizes what I needed to do to a real TEI document (specifically my forthcoming title What is the TEI?) to get it to work with Lodel: the full story is implicit in an XSLT stylesheet I wrote for the purpose. Actually, when I say ‘I’, I should make clear that the conversion was in fact handled by the nice people at Open Editions, who were remarkably patient with my eccentric use of TEI, and my even more eccentric wish to generate a Lodel document directly with as little manual intervention as possible. My thanks to Jean-François Rivière and Martin Dulong from Open Editions for their helpfulness, both in steering my TEI manuscript through the process, and in responding politely to my inane questions about what on earth was wrong with my lovely tagging.The following list shows (in no particular order) the chief changes I found necessary and in some cases a bit unexpected.As might be expected, the Lodel schema doesn't have any of the following semantic elements, which I have found useful when marking up technical documents: &#60;gi&#62;, &#60;att&#62;, &#60;ident&#62;, &#60;val&#62;.  More surprisingly perhaps, it doesn't seem to have &#60;foreign&#62;, &#60;emph&#62;, &#60;soCalled&#62;, &#60;mentioned&#62;, &#60;q&#62; or &#60;quote&#62;either. My stylesheet turned all of them into &#60;hi rendition="#gi"&#62;, and also generated a &#60;rendition&#62; element with an appropriate default style for them.The Lodel schema doesn't allow lists or quotes to be contained by paragraphs. This is a generic HTML limitation, if I understand aright, but that doesn't make it any less annoying. Call me verbose if you will, but I often write a single para with a bit of prose, followed by a list, a bit more prose, and another list. My stylesheet had to do some clever fiddling to deal with this (tx SPQR) but this is one case where I think Lodel should be a bit more broad minded.In fact, the Lodel schema only knows about two kinds of list: type=ordered which are numbered, and type=unordered, which are not. Gloss lists are not supported, so my stylesheet had to tweak &#60;label&#62; elements into a &#60;hi rend="#label"&#62; child at the start of an unordered list item (but with @rendition of "gloss").My TEI documents can have lots of XML examples, which are easier to read if they are wrapped in a differently-namespaced &#60;egXML&#62; container. The Lodel schema requires use of the &#60;code&#62; element, containing either a CDATA marked section inside it to preserve the layout, or XML tagging escaped by entity references. The only problem with this is that &#60;code&#62; is a phrase level element, not a block, which means that some hand tweaking is needed at the Lodel end.Lodel is intended for journal articles and manages each of them separately as a distinct TEI document. Chapters of a book have to be treated in the same way, which seems a bit odd -- for example, each chapter gets its own TEI header. My stylesheet splits things up rather crudely, assuming that each top level &#60;div&#62; within the body is intended to be a separate document.Lodel insists on having an explicit indication of the nesting level of each subdivision, using (bizarrely) the @subtype attribute on &#60;div&#62; with values level1 level2 etc. My stylesheet grits its teeth and generates these automatically, but I think this is one design aspect of Lodel which might merit a second thought.The Lodel schema doesn't allow headings within anything except sections, so you cannot provide them for lists, tables, or figures without some fiddling about.Lodel doesn't number headings for you. Even if you supply a number for a section (using the @n attribute on a &#60;div&#62;, as recommended in the Guidelines), Lodel will not use it. My stylesheet does nothing about this: I just decided to live without numbered sections.Lodel handles cross references using much as you'd expect, provided that the value of @target is a complete URL, i.e. a link outside the current document. This means you cannot cross reference other sections of the document being encoded which seems rather an odd restriction. Put together with the foregoing lack of automatic section numbering, this can make for quite a lot of rewriting.Lodel knows about &#60;bibl&#62;, but not &#60;biblStruct&#62; or &#60;biblFull&#62;. Up to a point. Most of the semantic elements defined for the content of bibliographic elements (&#60;publisher&#62;, &#60;biblScope&#62;, etc.) are allowed, but it doesn't actually do anything with them. To produce a correctly formatted bibliography, such encodings have to be converted to a fully styled version, following the requirements of the Open Edition style guide. I wrote a stylesheet to do (most of) this for one small bibliography: in the general case something much more complicated would be necessary.That last caveat is of course true of all the rest: I've only tested this process properly on one text, albeit a reasonably large one, and only on a born-digital document. If you're thinking of authoring documents in TEI though, chances are you won't do it significantly differently from me, so some of the issues I encountered will affect you too. And, for the avoidance of doubt, let me repeat that none of this is meant to discourage anyone from using Lodel!