  This paper provides an introduction to the Text Encoding Initia-tive (TEI),
focused at bringing in newcomers who have to deal with a digital document
project and are looking at the capacity that the TEI environment may have to
fulfil his needs. To this end, we avoid a strictly technical presentation of
the TEI and concentrate on the actual issues that such projects face, with
parallel made on the situation within two institutions. While a quick
walkthrough the TEI technical framework is provided, the papers ends up by
showing the essential role of the community in the actual technical
contributions that are being brought to the TEI.
